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How corporations manipulate the Internet

Russia’s natural resource oversight body to keep mum on catastrophes from now on Anna Kireeva, Charles Digges, 16/08-2012 […] Now, all information requests sent to Rosprirodnadzor’s press service will be subject to scouring by the special commission before it is released to the public  – a decision greeted by some of Kirillov‘s subordinates as anti-democratic and needlessly complex.

 Rosprirodnadzor is one of the Russian government’s most important sources of information about environmental conditions in Russia

How to manipulate the Internet  by arclight2011 1 September 12,  Below, are quotes from some articles that are looking at issues of internet blocking and manipulation of searches etc..

I live in the UK, and recently discovered that Uk government requests to access peoples personal data was much lower than other countries. This was because laws passed last year allow authorities to hack anyone of interest…..

they do not need to apply to the courts any more, they have to put them on the recently renamed DOMESTIC EXTREMIST DATABASE (DED) office. The DED now have no name so as to deter data protection requests from a concerned public. As you will see below, other countries also censure/manipulate data to suit local needs and some countries are more open than others..

I wanted to cover censorship and manipulation in Japan and the USA after the Gulf Oil Spill and Fukushima tragedy but the PR company (OGILVY and MATHER, WPP) that smoothed over the disasters would need its own article.

For now here are some examples of how the manipulation works.

Irradiated Russian region moves to manipulate its Internet image Charles Digges, 29/07-2011[…] Authorities in Chelyabinsk have announced that they will pay the equivalent of $13,000 in order to try to alter the region’s “online footprint” so that people looking for information on Chelyabinsk on the internet read “positive or neutral evaluations of the ecological situation” there.

The campaign has drawn immediate outrage from local environmentalists

[…] The Chelyabinsk government put the order for the internet  “optimization” project on the Federal government’s official site for tenders on regional projects, and specified that the project was to improve search results appearing on Google and the Russian search engine Yandex.

Optimizaton involves software experts using online tricks and techniques to “optimise”  – or some say manipulate –  search engine results.  Specifically, the optimization project is targeted on altering the “first 10 returned queries” on these two search engines. [….]

Internet companies lining up to lend a hand According to published material on participants in the tender, the company Interregional Marking Centre Chelyabinsk-Moscow has said it can complete the optimization project for $5,000 and the Sitiko.ru internet firm has listed $7,000 as its price; the highly qualified IP Abyasov, which handles the internet site of the Chelyabinsk governor’s office said it will do the job for $24,000.

According to Mironova, the money to pay for the internet optimization project will come from Chelyabinsk’s regional budget. […]   The searches would return positive or neutral results. The content of negative material, according to the project outline, would be no more than 20 percent, or no more than 30 per 150 lines of returned search material on either Google or Yandex. Wikipedia has been exempted.

The company signed to take on the optimization project would be expected to start cleansing negative information from December 31, 2011.

[…]Local authorities say they believe the regions ecological problems are exaggerated and say they are determined to clean up its image in order to attract more investment and tourism.

The protests of local authorities that Chelyabinsk’s environmental problems are on the mend, noted Mironova, are contradicted by the fact that the federal government sends an annual $464 million aid package to the region. […] http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2011/chelyabinsk_internet

Russia’s natural resource oversight body to keep mum on catastrophes from now on Anna Kireeva, Charles Digges, 16/08-2012 […] Now, all information requests sent to Rosprirodnadzor’s press service will be subject to scouring by the special commission before it is released to the public  – a decision greeted by some of Kirillov‘s subordinates as anti-democratic and needlessly complex.

Rosprirodnadzor is one of the Russian government’s most important sources of information about environmental conditions in Russia, and the new process of reviewing journalistic requests will, at the very least, make reporting on Russia’s environment far more cumbersome, possibly leading to interminable delays on facts about eventual catastrophes – if indeed the special commission intends to release information at all.

[…]According to the daily official newspaper Izvestia, Rosprirodnadzor officials will now be forbidden to comment on any information concerning emergency situations. Information on environmental emergencies will be subject to special scrutiny by the new commission, according to Rosprirodnadzor’s remarks to the paper, in order to avoid fanning flames of panic among the population. The special commission will be made of up Rosprirodnadzor upper brass.

“Such a commission has not existed earlier, it’s a fresh directive that was issued literally this week by Kirillov, and I have no choice but to subordinate myself to it,” an unnamed source within the service told Izvestia. “We have many things of interest, and trying to hold in one’s head what can be told and what cannot be told is complicated. Our outward appearance is democratic, but that is not in fact the case.”

[…] “The best way to fight panic among the population is to be honest,” he said.  “The commissions as proposed by Rosprirodnadzor will raise further suspicion to the information coming from the agency.”

Former Rosprirodnadzor deputy chief Oleg Mitvol, who is familiar with the forming of the commission, says the decision is “extremely unreasonable.”

[…] Kudrik agreed, adding that, ”The lack of adequate information about natural disasters is not an entirely Russian phenomena. Information released by Japanese officials about the Fukushima disaster was far from being adequate.”

[…] “If we look at the broader picture of the situation in Russia as of today, the initiative from Rosprirodnadzor is not an isolated incident but rather a trend characterized by a crack down on internet media,” he said, adding that Russia four state television stations and most of its daily newspapers were hardly in danger of shriveling in an information drought – mainly because truthful information is not their business. [.]http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2012/rosprirodnadzor_gag

September 1, 2012 - Posted by arclight2011 | media, secrets,lies and civil liberties, Spain