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DOROTHY CHOU: Good evening, everyone.
I'm Dorothy Chou and I work at Google.
And I'm responsible for what we call our
Transparency Report.
It shows when governments ask us to remove information from
our services or hand over user data.
So overall, we see a very disturbing trend.
The number of governments that sensor has gone from 4 in 2002
to about 42 today.
And that's in just a decade.
We operate in about 150 different
countries around the world.
And more than 25 of our services have been blocked at
any given time.
So we created this report precisely to track the types
of trends about access to information online.
So for those of you who don't know what this is, I'm going
to go through a brief overview.
And then I'll talk a little bit about
what we released today.
And then talk a little bit about how we move forward.
The Transparency Report has three specific parts.
The first is our traffic report.
It shows the availability of our services in 150 different
countries around the world.
And this is one of our most--
the first instance that we saw, which as you may know, is
Egypt taking its country offline after the Tahrir
Square uprising.
But we also see some other interesting events.
And this is one of my personal favorites.
Basically what happened was we saw an odd dip in Armenian and
Georgian traffic.
And we were so confused since we've never seen this
phenomenon in those countries.
What actually happened was that there was an elderly
woman who happened to be a copper scavenger who happened
to just chop the line that was carrying the internet between
those two countries.
And then what happened was that they didn't have internet
access for five hours and, therefore, didn't have access
to our services for five hours.
We also see, though, some really optimistic trends.
For example, in Myanmar, when they lifted a ban on foreign
news sites for the first time in 2011 and we saw YouTube
traffic suddenly go up.
This site is actually updated in real time.
So if you ever want to see if Blogger was available in
Ireland or not, you could do that.
The second part of our report, which is part of what we
updated today, is our removal requests, which include the
number of times we're asked by governments to remove
information from our services, like search results, YouTube
videos, or blog posts.
Government requests showed very interesting trends about
the effects of laws on the ground.
Some of which may have unintended consequences in the
free flow of information.
So take Brazil for example, where you have a very broad
definition of defamation.
Even if you say things that are true, they can still issue
you a court order--
issue us a court order--
to remove that from our services.
And so you see that number being very
high for that country.
This is updated every six months.
In our removals portion, we also have our copyright
report, which we launched last month.
This shows the number of search results that copyright
owners around the world ask us to remove because they
allegedly link to infringing content.
And we update this every 24 hours.
And finally, our user data requests show the number of
times governments ask us to hand over user information in
criminal cases.
So this is part of what we updated today, along with our
government requests, where we uploaded data from July to
December, 2011.
In this particular reporting period, the second half of
last year, we saw governments continue to target political
speech for removal, which we've actually seen for all
five sets of data that we've released since 2010.
And we think it's particularly alarming.
Mostly because this cycle, it came from countries that you
wouldn't normally expect.
So let me share a little bit about what we saw that we
found concerning.
In Spain, for example, we were asked to remove 270 different
search results that link to blogs and articles in
newspapers referencing individuals, political
figures, including mayors and public prosecutors.
In Poland, we received a request from a public
institution to remove links to a site that criticized it.
And we didn't comply with that request either.
In Canada, which is one of our most interesting cases to
date, we actually received a request to remove a video of a
man urinating on his Canadian passport and then flushing it
down the toilet.
Now, it does sound kind of funny, but then when we
actually took a look at the user himself, he was actually
a Quebecois separatist, so it was actually a case of
political speech.
And in Pakistan, we actually were asked to remove videos
that had to do with
criticizing military officials.
So what this tells us is that there are consistent patterns
to remove political speech.
And in many cases, this doesn't actually fall under a
specific law.
For the first time, we're also showing the number of court
orders that we receive from judges after governments go
through due process, as opposed to the informal
requests that we receive from governments who don't go
through due process.
And we show this difference because we believe it's
important for courts to be deciding what is legal and
what is not.
With this data, we're generally contributing to a
public conversation about how laws and policies and
behaviors influence access to information online.
And many of the laws, like I said, that are being created
may unintentionally result in overbroad censorship or
surveillance.
And with these government requests and this data that we
present, we hope that policymakers can actually see
what's going on online, and then adjust and reform and
tailor the laws that they have to make sure they're more
effective and relevant in the ways that are intended.
So one great example that I like is a very young Indian
MP, in September, 2010, actually cited the compliance
number in our request as an interpretation to say the
majority party is actually trying to influence the people
to go their way by asking people to take
down political speech.
So generally, what do we need to move forward from here?
Well ideally, we would like government themselves to be
more transparent and open about when and why they're
asking us to remove information from
services, if ever.
This is an important aspect of democracy, which is that
people are able to hold their governments accountable.
And if they want to change that law they can exercise the
democratic process to do that.
The harm comes when there are no checks or balances and
there's a significant danger of scope creep when there is a
lack of disclosure.
The fact is, the effects of laws that directly impact
censorship and surveillance are quickly becoming
entrenched.
And we need the public to know and be able to confirm if
those laws and policies are actually created in their best
interest and enforced in their best interest.
And to do that, we need more transparency.
We're also asking more companies to join us so that
we can actually get a better picture of
what's going on online.
Our view is pretty incomplete and limited because it's only
about our services.
That's all we can see.
And so we would like more data points that show a larger
context about what's going on.
For example, a government could issue us two requests in
a reporting period, but issue another company 1,000 and we
would never know that.
And finally, we need researchers to look at our
data, to build on it, and to find these trends and call it
like it is.
In countries that traditionally cherish free
expression, the risk is not that free speech disappears
overnight, but rather it's that gradual erosion that we
really need to watch out for.
And without more transparency, we won't be able to realize
what's going on until it's much too late.
We really can't afford to mistake internet censorship
for anything other than what it is, which is the threat to
societies that believe that more information leads to more
freedom, more choice, and ultimately more power for the
individual.
An open internet, one that continues to fulfill the
democratic function of giving voice to individuals,
particularly those who speak in dissent, demands that each
of us makes the right choices to resist censorship and other
acts to chill speech.
As more transparency allows us to see that laws and policies
are eroding rather than enhancing internet freedom,
let us exercise the power to change them.
Thank you.
MALE SPEAKER: We have a couple minutes.
Anybody got a question?
I emphasize question, not a speech.
Yes, in the front.
We might have a microphone we can get to you, yes we can.
If you'd like to tell us just who you are and the question
then, please.
AUDIENCE: I'm from you Kyrgyzstan.
We receive internet through Kazakhstan.
And unfortunately, time to time, many Google services are
not available.
We're not able to open some links because of filtering.
And the question is how we can solve this problem.
Because our citizens have a right to access to entire
information without limitations.
What Google does in Kazakhstan in order to ensure appropriate
access of our citizens?
How can we solve this problem?
And this is a question about that in your diagram, I saw
that Kazakhstan was--
MALE SPEAKER: OK, we have the question there.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
DOROTHY CHOU: That's a really good question.
One of the limitations of our report-- and I'll caveat this
with the fact that at Google, what we like to do is not
necessarily let perfect be the enemy of the good.
So if we think data is important, we will release it,
and then we'll keep on improving on it.
One of the limitations of our traffic report is that it
doesn't show granular filtering the way that you are
describing.
Which is the same for, for example,
keyword filtering, right?
That's something that we're looking into and we would like
to be able to show more and more.
Generally, on our services, we try to ensure that they are as
robust as possible.
That said, the threat of internet censorship from
governments is getting more and more complicated.
And it's getting more and more scary.
And I do think that there is more that can be done
government to government that can help to put pressure in
that situation.
MALE SPEAKER: Anybody else?
Yes, lady at the front.
One moment, you'll have a mic, thanks.
DINA: name is Dina, and I am from Kazakhstan.
MALE SPEAKER: OK.
DOROTHY CHOU: There you go!
DINA: In Kazakhstan we do know that some of the Google
services are blocked in Kazakhstan, like Blog.com,
Blogspot.com, blog platform, like main blog platform.
And it's blocked since I think 2009.
And my question is, did Kazakhstani government send
the request to you to block it, for some reason, or did
they do it just for some reason?
DOROTHY CHOU: As far as I know, they did not send us a
request to block it.
But as you know, our report only goes back to about the
second half of 2009.
So it would depend on-- and that's when I started working
on the report.
But since then, I don't know that specific case.
MALE SPEAKER: OK.
Just gentleman there in the middle with his hand up, yeah.
We're going to get a microphone to you.
Keep your hand up, yeah, it's coming.
MARK JOHNSON: Thank you.
My name is Mark Johnson from the Economist in London.
It's laudable that you have such a good system for logging
and responding to requests from governments.
And indeed, publicizing it.
Do you think that Google does enough to log and respond to
requests from individuals for take down, both in terms of
responding to good requests, valid requests, and in terms
of publicizing bad requests that may lead to censorship?
DOROTHY CHOU: That's a good question.
So let me clarify something.
We have court orders here, obviously, in these requests.
Those court orders could have come from a private dispute,
and we just count it as a government request because
it's a government entity, which is a court
issuing that to us.
So we do, obviously, comply with a significant number of
court orders there, and that counts
for individual requests.
If you're talking about the flags for user removal, we
actually do respond to those very quickly.
And we are very concerned about that as well.
All legal removals do come through our legal team and
they usually come through the government.
MALE SPEAKER: OK, we're going to leave it at
that for the moment.
Thanks very much, Dorothy.
Thank you.