I was so surprised to read that the Obama administration (and Obama himself !) called Wikileaks a criminal organization. Logically speaking, if Wikileaks is a criminal organization, then the New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and The Guardian are too (they have been working with criminals) and should be blamed for complicity. Is this relevant or just ludicrous ? The problem here is not WikiLeaks, it is about the “politics of naming” that should force those who lead those policies to be consistent from the beginning to the end. Amateurism…

I was surprised to hear that the US State Department has required all its staff and employees not to read the disclosed documents. Not only does this information sound like a revival of old forms of conscience censorship, but it is also so ridiculous given that the State Department still call those documents “confidential” and “Top Secret”.

I was surprised by French Minister of Telecommunications Eric Besson saying this week-end that he wants to take action to try and block Wikileaks from being hosted by French Server/Host Owni on the Internet. The Internet is so liquid and volatile that any attempt to block a website’s content from being hosted by another website could only be  a waste of time: if Besson succeeds, no wonder then that Wikileaks would always manage to  be hosted by another guy.

Why are our officials so incompetently appointed? The problem here is not WikiLeaks but the lack of though and judgment of some people applying “real life” measures to what should be once and for all understood as a complex new digital age.

I was very surprised to receive an e-mail email from OSA (Office of Students Affairs) sent to SIPA’s entire body warning students not to discuss the wikileaks fiasco in any online forum, lest students interested in pursuing careers within the State Department would put their future in jeopardy. This directive seems odd considering that last year, the head of the State Department’s new e-Diplomacy was talking at SIPA. It was about need-to-share and transparency policies…

My only consolation last week came from T.Friedman’s new Op-Ed in the New York Times. The author wrote a fiction piece called « From Wiki China » where he imagines : « What if China had a WikiLeaker and we could see what its embassy in Washington was reporting about America? ».

A Must Read. Enjoy !

Last week, Chinese authorities arrested Cheng Jianping (online alias of Wang Yi) and sentenced her to a year-long labor camp for “disturbing social order” — or more specifically, for retweeting a satirical message about attacking Japan’s pavilion at the Shanghai Expo.

The original message that Cheng reposted was from her fiance, joking about recent protests in China in which some Chinese smashed Japanese goods. Her fiance wrote, “Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago … It’s not a new trick. If you really wanted to kick it up a notch, you’d immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion.”

Cheng retweeted the above, adding to it, “Angry youth, charge!”

According to statements from Amnesty International to Reuters, her tweet was retweeted by only three people. The group also stated that she may be “the first Chinese citizen to become a prisoner of conscience on the basis of a single tweet.”

The director for the Asia-Pacific within Amnesty, Sam Zarifi, added, “Sentencing someone to a year in a labour camp, without trial, for simply repeating another person’s clearly satirical observation on Twitter demonstrates the level of China’s repression of online expression.”

Though Cheng may be the first arrest on the basis of a single satirical tweet, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen China crack down the whip on the use of social networks and media. The most popular example may be that of recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, jailed for his low-level activism and use of media to speak up against the Chinese government.

Just a few days ago, the organizers of the Chinese Blogger Conference — started in 2005 — were forced to cancel the annual event due to pressure from authorities. The venue was announced just four days before the two-day conference, but the venue’s owners reneged the location’s use for the conference after being pressured by authorities.

Blogs, social networks, and other mediums used for information sharing have been harshly regulated in China. There are few avenues by which users can still voice themselves to some extent. A Twitter microblogging equivalent, Weibo, was launched in China after the Twitter ban but posts are closely monitored by Chinese government. Again, programs and companies like Tweetdeck also allow for a backdoor entry way to reach the banned mediums. The Amazon Kindle seems to be popular as well, as the e-book technology gives people a way to connect to Facebook.

It’s interesting to see how social media and networking will continue to unfold and develop — or not — in China.

In order to operate in China both Google and Yahoo! have filtered searches, although Google did withdraw from China between March and July in 2010 as a reaction to their servers being hacked and its users’ email accounts compromised.

In mid-December 2009, Google detected an extremely sophisticated attack on their infrastructure, as well as on more than twenty other large companies. Originating from China, the primary goal of the attacks was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. In March, Google shut down its China-based search engine, and redirected all queries to its uncensored Hong Kong-based site. Xiao Qiang of the China Internet project, University of California, Berkeley, has said:

“The Internet was seen as a catalyst for China being more integrated into the world. The fact that Google cannot exist in China clearly indicates that China’s path as a rising power is going in a direction different from what the world expected and what many Chinese were hoping for.”

Google is not the only internet giant to experience grief from the Chinese censors. In July 2009, Facebook reported access problems and today remains inaccessible from China.

In June 2009, coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of the bloody military suppression of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, China blocked Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail:

“In order to improve the internet content and provide a healthy environment for our netizens, we have designated 3 to 6 June as the national server maintenance day. This move is widely supported by the public.”

–Chinese censors, South China Morning Post

YouTube has also been effected, and in March 2009 was blocked after the Chinese government denounced footage of security forces beating Tibetans in Lhasa as “a lie”.

The most recent censorship outrage in China has come as a result of this year’s Nobel peace prize recipient, Liu Xiaobo. Xiaobo is a Chinese intellectual, writer, human rights activist and a political prisoner in China. On 8 October 2010, the Nobel Committee awarded Liu the Prize “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”.

Previously, upon hearing of Liu’s nomination, the Chinese foreign ministry warned the Nobel committee not to give Liu the prize, saying it would be against Nobel principles. Liu was a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests.

In China today, “Liu Xiaobo” has been added to the list of no-go phrases, and searching for his name will result in the oh too familiar message “The connection has been reset”.

Called The Curious Case of Jia Junpeng, or The Power of Symbolic Appropriation in Chinese Cyberspace, the essay is taken from a talk given by Guobin at a conference earlier this month on how memes spread in China.

As Leonard summarizes:

Yang tells the story of how a single 12-character message — “Jia Junpeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat” — posted to an online forum frequented mainly by bored gamers frustrated with delays in the rollout of World of Warcraft in China, became a viral sensation — attracting 7 million hits and 300,000 comments in one day — that received widespread coverage from Chinese media.

Both are worth the read.

Guobin’s piece is here.

Leonard’s is here.

As the Times highlights, one notable aspect about Zhao’s film is that it was created illegally:

The Chinese government has decreed that all films must be approved by government censors before being distributed and screened, including in overseas film festivals.

Mr. Zhao, 39, said getting the approval of the censors was never a consideration. “It’s like asking to be raped,” he said this month in an interview here. “The government certainly has its own agenda. They want us to stop. But at the same time we know we’re doing something meaningful.”

This is a political example of what we have seen over the past decade in the commercial world: the rise of relatively inexpensive digital devices has decentralized the means of all communication, be it political, cultural or otherwise. One isn’t tethered to a formal entity that has the capital to afford equipment and the channels to distribute a final product. Production values will differ, of course, so too access to and ease of distribution. But we are in an age where anyone with the talent and perseverance can create significant works on relatively inexpensive digital devices and desktop editing suites.

The cameras, recording devices and equipment we have access to today are “good enough,” as Robert Capps explains in “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine.” While Capps writes specifically about consumer acceptance of gadgets and formats that are “good enough,” as we see from Zhao’s work, it applies to overall production as well.

“Ghost Town” premieres today at the New York Film Festival.

Schools in Beijing are quietly removing the Green Dam filter, which was required for all school computers in July, due to complaints over problems with the software.

China last month formally backed down on a plan to preinstall the Internet filter software on all new computers sold in the country after July 1 after an international and domestic outcry.

A June WSJ article provides a good backgrounder on the issue:

…it would be naïve to think that scrapping the Green Dam mandate means the end of headaches for computer- and device-makers world-wide. More and more governments — including democracies like Britain, Australia and Germany — are trying to control public behavior online, especially by exerting pressure on Internet service providers. Green Dam has only exposed the next frontier in these efforts: the personal computer.