Google Reveals That the U.S. Is a Leader in Web Censorship

When we think of online censorship, we think of places like China, a country notorious for its Great Firewall. Just two weeks ago, party officials were forced to block searches for "Shanghai stock market" when the index opened at exactly 2346.98 and closed 64.89 points lower by the end of trading, numbers symbolizing the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests that occurred June 4, 1989 (6.4.89). Coincidence or conspiracy aside, imagine having U.S. market searches blocked. Seems ludicrous, right?

Or we might even consider third world regimes like Ethiopia, where a quick call on Skype will land you fifteen years in prison. But attacks against freedom of speech on the internet are everywhere, even in the West, where governments are now starting to take notes from their more oppressive peers. The latest transparency report from Google shows a surge in government takedown requests with the U.S. leading the pack.

In all, Uncle Sam asked for 6,192 items to be removed across 187 requests, more than any other country and up 103 percent over the prior year. While Google finds the sudden jump unsurprising, "since each year we offer more products and services, and we have a larger number of users," the long term picture seems clear. Just as the U.S. government is getting acclimated with cyberwar, it's also increasingly dabbling with internet censorship.

And however predictable it all may be, Google still finds the developments disturbing – as they should. “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,” Google’s senior policy analyst Dorothy Chou wrote in a blog post Sunday.

For Jillian York, the director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it's the worst kind of censorship. "This is particularly insidious because, in doing so, that content is not merely hidden behind a firewall but instead disappears entirely," she told Ars Technia. That means no amount of savvy internet wrangling can help.

Google says that they only comply with requests that they believe to be reasonable, readily rebuffing requests they find irrelevant. For example, Google stated that "We received a request from the Passport Canada office to remove a YouTube video of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet. We did not comply with this request." And when they can, they try to avoid requests involving political speech:

"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 a public institution to remove links to a site that criticized it. We didn't comply with either of these requests."

Of course, that didn't stop them from removing YouTube videos that mocked the Thai monarchy. It's an trying tight rope walk for an information company that spans the globe. Even with the best of intentions, Google is still a business. Push too hard and Google gets handily dumped altogether as they were from mainland China not long ago.

And while the company that brought us "Do No Evil," certainly deserves plaudits for bringing attention to a growing problem, there is still the question over how much information Google shares with Big Brother.

“Google has been criticized for failing to reveal much about its reported partnership with the National Security Agency following a Chinese attack on its systems in 2010,” writes Forbes.com columnist Andy Greenberg. “And the company has yet to take a stand on the House’s recently-passed Cyber Infrastructure Security and Protection Act or its equivalents in the Senate, which are designed to give companies far more leeway to hand data over to government agencies for security purposes.”

Worryingly, it seems that when it comes to the U.S. government, Google is having trouble saying no. Of 6,321 requests for private user data in the second half of last year (an increase of 37 percent) Google complied a record breaking 93 percent of the time.

On its end, Google promises to uphold a certain level of integrity. “We review each request to make sure that it complies with both the spirit and the letter of the law, and we may refuse to produce information or try to narrow the request in some cases.” For now, we’ll just have to trust them.

Follow Alec on Twitter: @sfnuop.

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