Posts tagged Govt
Did the French Govt. Ask Twitter to Suspend Satirical Accounts?
Feb 19th
The morning after French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced he will run for a second term, several parodic Twitter accounts have mysteriously been suspended.
@_nicolassarkozy , an account created in September 2010 and clearly labeled as a satirical Sarkozy impersonation, was suspended on Feburary 16th.
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Powerful People & Targeted Botnets: the End of @ Political Satire?
@_nicolassarkozy was managed by Kaboul.fr, a French political and satirical online webzine, that holds many other satirical Twitter accounts, like @_Carla_Bruni, Sarkozy’s wife, @_Jacques_Chirac, the former french president, and @FrancoisHolland, Sarkozy’s main competitor in the ongoing presidential race.
Fabrice Epelboin, the former editor of ReadWriteWeb France, is the founder of Fhimt.com, a Tunisian social media site focusing on the intersection of IT and politics.
According to Kaboul.fr, which, after complaining, received an answer from Twitter, @_nicolassarkozy was “suspended after being reported.” Twitter also told Kabul.fr that to be granted such priviledge, the suspension had to be made by Sarkozy, or someone acting on his authority.
In fact, the official response, leaked to Pastebinshows Twitter describing the account as “engag(ing) in non-parody impersonation.” The chance that the parodic nature of the account could be missed is slight.
More troubling, three other accounts, all clearly opposing Sarkozy’s political views, were suspended at the same time: @mafranceforte, @fortefrance and @SarkozyCaSuffit. Those accounts where not related to Kaboul.fr, nor impersonating local politician, but straight-ahead, and recently-created, politically-oriented Twitter accounts.
Although the news is making a huge buzz in France, it isn’t the first time a such censorship has occurred in the country. Other Twitter accounts that were problematic to the French president’s personal brand management were massively suspended last summer, those belonging to French gossip website Mixbeat.
A total 29 accounts managed by Mixbeat where suspended during July 2011. The only three of theirs that weren’t suspended were created from a different I.P. address, according to Mixbeat’s Carl de Canada.
Three other accounts, all clearly opposing Sarkozy’s political views, where also suspended at the same time: @mafranceforte @fortefrance and @SarkozyCaSuffit. Those accounts where not related to Kaboul.fr, nor impersonating local politician, but straight-ahead and recently-created politically-oriented Twitter accounts.
The massive suspension of Mixbeat’s accounts occured a few days after its webmaster tweeted some rumors about Carla Bruni, president Sarkozy’s wife, concerning her pregnancy.
All other accounts opened since by Carl de Canada have ended up being suspended, and despite a public dispute with Twitter, and many posts publised on Mixbeat, the website is still unable to be on Twitter in any way, fighting some mysterious forces and an uncooperative Twitter customer service.
The Gallic Infowar @Twitter
Information war on Twitter is a common practice, especialy since the beginning of the Arab Spring, in January 2011. Twitter has proven to be a solid propaganda platform used by many authoritarian regimes.
Twitter botnets, consisting of a network of centrally-controled twitter accounts, are a common practice. By mass-reporting a targeted account as spam, a group can easily get a Twitter account suspended.
But according to Mixbeat, this is not what happened to its accounts. Carl de Canada claims some special messenger from Sarkozy asked Twitter to suspend them.
Still, the Twitter botnet “targeted spam report” technique could explain the three other suspicious account suspensions which occured last thursday. Such tools are quite common, and are actualy far from being the most sophisticated infowar tool made to cheat and deceive social networks. The U.S. army accidentaly posted in June 2010 a call for proposals on its website for a very sophisticated software called “persona management.” A Twitter botnet is far from being as complex.
French State Secretary Nadine Morano was accused of buying false followers on Twitter just like Newt Gingrich
Five months ago, a large Twitter botnet of several thoursand accounts was mapped by an eReputation management expert team, spotted as they were massively posting and retweeting content supporting Sarkozy. More recently, French State Secretary Nadine Morano was accused of buying false followers on Twitter just like Newt Gingrich.
France is one of, if not the leader in online warfare, when it comes to digital weaponry designed to be used against civilian using the Internet. A market recently estimated by Wikileaks to around $US10 billion. France sells Internet surveillance technology to numerous African and Middle East countries, including Syria , Iran and Qaddafi’s Libya. Both Twitter and Facebook are battlefields for dictatorships willing to extend political oppression to the online world, and, since the Tunisian Revolution, the market is skyrocketing.
As Sarkozy officially opened the race for the presidency in France last week, it looks like this will be France’s first presidential election in which the Internet could play a major role. But it also looks like it will not be, in any way, what happend during Obama’s first run for the presidency. In France, the Internet will most probably be used in a very dirty way.
As we say in the startup world : eat your own dogfood
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
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Matt Cutts Convinces Some South Korean Govt. Websites To Stop Blocking Googlebot
Jan 31st
Matt Cutts, international diplomat? That might be the more appropriate title for Google’s chief spam cop. According to the Wall Street Journal, Cutts is in South Korea this week and, in a presentation Monday night for about 80 government officials, webmasters, lawyers and journalists, managed…
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IDC: New Gov’t Cloud Architectures Reduce Costs Through Sharing
Jan 20th
Government computing resources, like any other government procurement, used to be purchased by agencies for those agencies… and nobody else. It didn’t make sense to share, because the very concept of sharing compute power didn’t even exist. Now in an almost unprecedented shift of philosophy, the U.S. Government is one of the world’s leading adopters of private cloud infrastructure. In order to slash costs fast, it’s moving to the cloud sooner than almost anyone else.
Now, some government agencies, departments, bureaus, and divisions that no longer have any reason to avoid maintaining their compute resources separately from one another, also have no viable reason for staying separate from one another. IDC analyst Shawn P. McCarthy has discovered, and discusses in a newly published report, local governments are rapidly slashing costs by purchasing compute power and capacity on a metered basis from state governments.
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Regional federal offices are doing the same by purchasing capacity and power from agencies upstream. The result is the creation of multi-agency, regional hubs procured for the first time not by any one division or department, but through new and emerging consolidation efforts that are bringing nearby local services and regional departments together for the first time.
McCarthy sees three pillars of private government cloud services, depicted in the diagram above. “Type 1″ are analogous to private clouds in private enterprises, hosted and managed entirely in-house. “Type 2″ are maintained by vendors or consultancies while hosted in-house. “Type 3″ are maintained by vendors and hosted off-site. Now, you may be wondering, just how can you have a private cloud that’s off-site? McCarthy explains that hardware for government private clouds are always devoted 100% to government services, even when they’re located elsewhere.
The most trusted compute service provider that a local government or department may find that complies with state and federal requirements, naturally, is a state or federal provider, McCarthy writes. There are upshots on both sides of this relationship: Compliance with state and federal data privacy and reporting regulations is more strongly ensured. Also, when several smaller agencies pool together to purchase computing power in volume, that volume helps drive down costs for each of them.
In turn, the bigger agencies recoup some of their costs for having procured upgraded, 21st century hardware.
“As government workers started interacting with systems located miles away from their offices (rather than down the hall), both CIOs and CFOs have seen that their organizations no longer need to be in the business of owning and operating multiple types of IT solutions,” McCarthy writes. “Today, common functions, such as e-mail, human resource management, procurement, and other business functions, can be obtained from cloud providers at a highly competitive price and with increasingly acceptable service-level agreements. Once they do the math, cloud is often the direction these organizations choose to move.”
But although McCarthy’s report is subtitled “The New ‘Trickle Down’ Effect That’s Boosting State and Local Computing,” he takes note of one quite unexpected, though not unforeseeable, phenomenon: Smaller departments and even state government offices could find themselves recouping costs by outsourcing cloud computing power upstream to bigger agencies. He writes, “Any level of government can, in theory, offer services to any other government office. It’s just a matter of building the infrastructure and having a way to offer reliable cloud-based services to government clients.”
McCarthy foresees a scenario where the complete upheaval in government hardware architecture could soon revolutionize the way its applications are created, sold, and delivered. For example, geological survey software may only be important to a few departments, and for that reason alone they tend to be expensive. Once it moves to a service model, conceivably a larger government agency (hypothetically, the U.S. Dept. of the Interior) could deliver “survey-as-a-service,” if you will, to smaller agencies that would pay not for the software but for the actual tasks performed. This could be the next wave of government structural reform that both reduces costs while improving efficiency.
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Syrian Blogger Kidnapped by Govt: This Week in Online Tyranny
Nov 4th
Syrian blogger disappeared. Hussein Ghrer, a prominent Syrian blogger headquartered in Damascus, disappeared after leaving his house on October 24. Syria has imprisoned, and possibly killed, many journalists, activists and bloggers during the civil strife in Syria.
In case I haven’t made this case lately: These people are you, nerds.
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Palestine experiences large-scale hack. The Renesys blog reports “significant but sporadic Internet outages in the Palestinian Territories today. As many as half of the routed networks of the Palestinian Territories were unreachable (withdrawn from the global routing table).” Both the Washington Post and the BBC have reported a possible hack on the Palestinian communications sector.
Egypt throws another blogger in the clink – and the revolution in the toilet. Prominent Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah has been arrested by the Egyptian military. He was summoned for questioning on Sunday. His last tweet says starkly, “Going in.” He has since been remanded for further questioning for 15 days. During his initial appearance he refused to answer questions, declaring the military court that held him, and sentenced fellow blogger Maikel Nabil to three years in prison, was illegitimate.
Kuwait arrests five Twitter users in six months. Kuwait has been arresting Twitterers based on a law – all too common – that makes it a crime to criticize the country’s leaders. On the positive side, Kuwaitis in general and opposition politicians in particular, have been calling bullshit on the arrests at the top of their lungs.
Hacktivist group Anonymous threatens drug cartel. Anonymous has targeted a Mexican drug cartel after that group, Los Zetas, allegedly kidnapped one of its members in Veracruz. In a video released on October 6, the group “claimed that they would release the names of journalists, taxi drivers and others who have worked with Los Zetas in the past” according to Foreign Policy. They also threatened to include the addresses of the collaborators on November 5.
According to the Mexican newspaper Milenio (via Talking Points Memo), some alleged members of Anonymous, including Skill3r and Glyniss Paroubek, are disavowing this operation. Others, including @AnonymouSabu, insist it is still on. We’ll find out tomorrow.
Google hands over Wikileaks volunteer’s info to U.S. government. Google handed over the contacts list and IP address data of Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer and developer for Tor, without a warrant. The government requested the information via a secret court order enabled by a controversial 1986 law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
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East Timor Govt Opens Financial Transparency Portal
Mar 15th
For most people, East Timor, known officially as the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, came to public notice in 2002 when it gained official independence from Indonesian occupation after a long, violent struggle that included the use by the Indonesian military of starvation as a tool for genocide.. In the time since, the country has experienced the usual amount of election violence and corruption that a new nation sees.
Now, the Timorese government has opened a FreeBalance-powered portal devoted to government financial transparency.
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FreeBalance is a Canadian company that provides software for public financial management, including online portals for government customers include the United States, Afghanistan, Uganda and Iraq.
On their website the government of Timor-Leste declared the goal of the project:
“The Transparency Website will allow people to participate, in real time and interactively, in the process of the Timor-Leste national budget and to contribute to National Development.”
FreeBalance explains the use a Timorese citizen could put the portal.
“Citizens can investigate projects further to view budget transactions to ensure the budget is being spent as intended. This ensures honesty and transparency to improve citizen and investor confidence. The Timor-Leste Transparency Portal provides 10 years of budget information: the budget that was approved and the actual budget spent. Reports and filtered results can be exported in PDF, Word, Excel, XML and HTML formats.”
Can such portals provide real transparency? Can transparency itself really make a difference in difficult situations like that in East Timor? Or do so many interests militate against it that the transparency will either not last or never be truly see-through? It’s something I don’t have an answer for.
If you do, having worked in government or for an NGO on the financial side, please leave a comment below.
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Egypt Blocks Facebook, Google – Anon Targets Egypt Govt
Jan 26th
Egypt has followed yesterday’s block of Twitter with reported intermittent blocks today of Facebook and on Google tools and services.
Although too much can be made of social media’s role in political activities, it certainly is not overstressed in the Egyptian uprising, at least not by the literate, digerate young people that use these tools to organize.
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Protests Continue Despite Block
Yesterday, up to 100,000 people protested in the streets of Egyptian cities, with the center of gravity in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Late last night, Egyptian police, along with civilian thugs and prisoners, cleared the square. Police shot protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas. Countrywide, three protesters and one police officer died.
Egyptians have used social media for years to organize protests and yesterday was no exception. In particular, the Facebook account We are all Khaled Said, dedicated to a man killed last year in Alexandria, called for, and reported on, the protests.
The block does not seem to have effected the turnout on this second day of protests. Yesterday, the protests were successful not merely due to the numbers but by the distributed nature of the gatherings. Flashmobs gathered in numerous parts of the larger cities and moved at a moment’s notice. This may be harder to coordinate today, though it is not certain social media was used so much to move the groups as to report on their having moved.
Since yesterday, protesters have used proxies, Tor and other services to get around the Twitter block. Cairo resident Ahmed Zidan, editor of MideastYouth Arabic, posted on his Facebook that he is using Al-Kasir.
The blocking of additional services is hardly unexpected. Its apparent abject failure must be, at least to the government.
Anonymous Targets Egyptian Government Sites
Anonymous has announced Operation Egypt with a press release in Arabic.
It says a main government information and tech ministry site, www.mcit.gov.eg, is down, though that does not appear to be the case as of this writing. Another targeted site, http://www.moiegypt.gov.eg/, does seem to be down.
Resources
The #jan26 hastag on Twitter is augmenting, if not altogether replacing yesterday’s #jan25. To follow the events unfolding today, consult any of the following. If you have additional sources, please post links in the comments.
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German Govt. Says Google Analytics Now Verboten
Jan 12th
In a move that could harm its own businesses, the German government is targeting Google on privacy issues again — this time over Google Analytics. German privacy officials are concerned that Google Analytics tracks web users’ IP addresses, and that could violate an individual’s…
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Venezuelan Govt Wants To Regulate The Internet
Dec 12th
The Venezuelan Vice President Elías Jaua has asked his country’s government to pass a law that would allow regulation of the internet and create one central access point for all distribution of the internet.
“The bill also proposes allowing the government to restrict access to websites if they are found to be distributing messages or information that incite violence against the president. Chavez frequently accuses the opposition of plotting to kill him,” Reuters Canada reported.
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