OONI Explorer: Censorship and other Network Anomalies Around the World

Speaking of censorship, let's all do what we can to help CN and RU readers read all about the Panama Papers!

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/07/china-ramps-up-panama-pape… China ramps up Panama Papers censorship after leaders' relatives named
Websites ordered to purge all reports related to documents following publication of political elite’s offshore secrets
Tom Phillips
7 Apr 2016

> Chinese censors have stepped up their censorship of websites, ordering all content related to the Panama Papers to be scrubbed as new revelations emerged of how relatives of some of the country’s top leaders had used secretive offshore companies to store their wealth. Documents from the leaked Mossack Fonseca database showed the relations of three of the seven members of the Communist party’s elite ruling council, the politburo standing committee, had companies that were clients of the offshore law firm. They included relatives of Chinese president Xi Jinping. A Communist party censorship directive instructed news organisations to purge all reports, blogs, bulletin boards and comments relating to this week’s highly sensitive revelations.

What are President Xi and his cronies frightened of?

This, perhaps?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square

One of the most significant implications of the CN ruling elite moving so much money out of CN is that they foresee the collapse of the Communist Party. I certainly hope so, because the Communist Party--- and the Democratic and Republican parties in the US--- are explicitly refusing to seriously address the rapidly approaching disasters of climate change, the pervasive replacement of human employees by robotic workers, inadequate government response to environmental disasters, global financial instability, and more.

But if all that is too scary to contemplate, here's a bit of juicy scandal (murder, money, luxury beyond imagining--- it's the Chinese "Dallas"!):

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/06/panama-papers-french-villa-…
he Panama Papers and the French villa at the heart of a Chinese scandal
Panama Papers detail the efforts made to conceal the true owner of the property – the wife of disgraced politician Bo Xilai
Juliette Garside and David Pegg
7 Apr 2016

> A villa linked to a British businessman’s murder in an extraordinary Chinese political scandal secretly changed hands just two weeks after his death. The luxurious €7m (£6m) property was at the heart of the tussle that led to Neil Heywood’s killing and triggered the downfall of the flamboyant politician Bo Xilai, jailed for life for corruption and power abuses. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, is serving a life sentence for poisoning Heywood in November 2011.

Then there's a world leader who is so paranoid that he can't move his arms when he walks:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/07/putin-dismisses-panama-pape…
Putin dismisses Panama Papers as an attempt to destabilise Russia
Russian president notes his name does not feature in files, which he says offer no proof of corruption
Alec Luhn in Moscow and Luke Harding in London
7 Apr 2016

> Vladimir Putin has offered his first response to the revelations in the Panama Papers, describing their publication as an attempt to destabilise Russia and saying there was no proof of corruption in the dossiers.

This somewhat dubious contention--- it's not like people in the UK aren't talking about the shenanigans of the Cameron/Astor plutocrats--- has won support among some US people who support Donald Trump. Putin neglected to point out that a considerable portion of the scandal surrounding Prime Minister Cameron's very wealthy family's tax shelters involves shell games in the Bahamas. And the NSA has for years recorded every phone call made in the Bahamas. So they knew, and they certainly didn't tell the New York Times--- a disgraced paper whose editors are hopping mad because they were not included among the 100 papers around the world which have been given access to the Panama Papers.

It's not just the RU and CH financial political elite who are ducking for cover behind censorship. The US political leadership is also very very frightened. What are they scared of? When we obtain a similar leak from the big US law firms which set up DE and NV companies, the same explosive implication will emerge: the US elite foresees the collapse of the Democratic and Republican parties which have protected their tax shelters for so long, as the political fortunes of Sanders and Warren continue to rise:

https://www.salon.com/2016/04/06/lessons_of_the_panama_papers_yes_the_r…
Lessons of the Panama Papers: Yes, the rich are different from us — they stole our money
A vast web of lies and corruption protecting the super-rich is revealed -- and it's only the tip of an evil iceberg
Andrew O'Hehir
6 Apr 2016

> ...
> What have we learned so far from the Panama Papers, the largest volume of leaked documents in history, which have begun to peel the lid off a vast web of global greed, deception and iniquity among the highest level of the moneyed classes? For starters, they should serve to remind us how different the very rich are from the rest of us. Yes, it starts with the fact that they have more money, but it doesn’t end there. How did they get all that money, and what are they doing with it? Why do they have so much more money than the rest of us — unimaginably more, and on an unprecedented scale? Why do they seem so perpetually unsatisfied with their wealth, and so desperate to nurture it, shield it and multiply it?

Because they are selfish?

David Cameron is a perfect example: he enjoys running the government, he just doesn't want to help pay for it.

It seems to be an enduring truism that poor people are more generous than rich people. Rich people can avoid taxes which poor people can't duck but that's not what I mean. Poor people also give more voluntarily, per capita. Some speculate about a law of Nature holding that the more you have, the more frightened you are of losing it all. Others say that the simplest explanation is that super-rich people are nasty because you can't get super-rich without being nasty to others. Possibly there is some truth in all of these conjectures.

But the US elite is worried about more than the collapse of the two party system. They foresee the collapse of the global economy and violent political upheaval inside the US, and they are preparing to flee. But they have the same problem as privacy advocates: there's really nowhere to flee too.

One of the really big stories which the US press is completely ignoring (so is the US political elite) is a rapidly approaching "phase transition" in the human condition, in which the default condition for adults changes from "employed" to "unemployable" (and if the rich are avoiding paying taxes, how will government obtain revenue to provide even the most essential services, like food banks for the starving?):

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/07/robots-replacing-j…
Are robots going to steal your job? Probably
People ridiculed the Luddites for opposing technological change that ultimately created new work. Today’s economic indicators don’t offer that hope
Moshe Y Vardi
7 Apr 2016

> If you put water on the stove and heat it up, it will at first just get hotter and hotter. You may then conclude that heating water results only in hotter water. But at some point everything changes – the water starts to boil, turning from hot liquid into steam. Physicists call this a “phase transition”. Automation, driven by technological progress, has been increasing inexorably for the past several decades. Two schools of economic thinking have for many years been engaged in a debate about the potential effects of automation on jobs, employment and human activity: will new technology spawn mass unemployment, as the robots take jobs away from humans? Or will the jobs robots take over release or unveil – or even create – demand for new human jobs?

Interestingly enough, the CN government *does* mention this issue, but takes the irresponsible position that it is entirely up to Chinese workers to figure out how to deal with the loss, not just of their job, but of their lifetime employability.

It's all of them against all of us.