I put in a drop-down translator at the top of the middle column. Let me know how it works for you. (Via RRW.)

The Committee to Protect Bloggers has agitated on behalf of people whose personal philosophies are repellent. But we have exerted our efforts not truly on their behalf but on behalf of freedom, the freedom to speak unpopular thoughts without government interference. I have noticed a tendency to confuse this sort of pressure, to keep governments out of the free speech business, with support of the contents of that speech. The CPB will advocate for anyone whose government is attempting to keep them from speaking their minds through intimidation and physical violence.

The whole idea of the CPB, or perhaps its ideal, is one of a society of open discourse, uncompromised by governmental interference. In other words, our goal is a free marketplace of ideas. In fact, when it comes to that marketplace, we are laissez-faire in the extreme. If an idea doesn’t float, it doesn’t deserve to. And, just as in a democracy a citizen is obligated to do his or her duty by voting, in a marketplace of ideas, the same obligation ensues.

So that’s why the validation of Holocaust deniers, and any other racist idiots, by universities and alleged “free speech” groups in countries where they are not silenced by the government is outright bullshit. This has recently come up in the town where I live, the university town of Eugene, Oregon, where a Holocaust denier has been invited to speak at the local university by an organization that calls itself a “free speech” group.

The government, at least in the U.S., is not in the business of jailing, or otherwise silencing, Holocaust deniers. But useful idiots like the Pacifica Forum nevertheless trot out a self-justifying appeal to free speech that is half-witted at best and cynical at worst. For a government to interfere and shut people up, even nitwits, is intolerable. Equally intolerable is making the advocation of cretins palatable by sprinkling free speech rhetoric on it.

In other words, any one, in any society in which the government is not silencing these opinions, is a voter. You are either voting for anti-Semitism and other forms of racism or you are voting against it. Whenever you hear people defending their glorification of evil, whether out of ignorance or cleverness, with free speech, well, it’s time to go to the polls. Check free speech or faux speech.

Update: A further report by Threat Level indicates Hushmail will be admitting to its users its intention and ability to provide their information to anyone with a Canadian warrant.

Hushmail, the web’s leading provider of encrypted web mail, updated its explanation of its security model, confirming a THREAT LEVEL report that the company can and will eavesdrop on its users when presented with a court order, even if the targets uses the company’s vaunted Java applet that does all the encryption and decryption in a browser.

According to Mashable, Hushmail, the Canadian web mail that has built its brand on being safe, has given up, and will continue to give up, information on its users to any hot young thing waving a warrant.

Hushmail “has turned over 12 CDs (full of information on ) three Hushmail accounts to US Federal authorities.”

On their website, they say “not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail.” . . . Hushmail uses OpenPGP and AES 256 to encrypt the contents of messages server-side. Theoretically, with the contents of one’s emails encrypted on the server, even if Hushmail were compelled to turn over the contents of one email, brute-force decryption routines should make the cracking process time-prohibitive.

“To date,” said Brian Smith, the company’s CTO in an email exchange with Wired, “we have not challenged a court order in court.”

So, if you use Hushmail to avoid a security service’s scrutiny, trusting the manifold claims that it makes to being safe, think again. Any government, with enough time and money, can figure out who you are if you’re online. Any government that has the help of Yahoo or Google, or Hushmail, doesn’t need as much time, or as much money.

Thanks, Hushmail, for lowering the bar.

Read more on Wired’s Threat Level blog.

Nart Villeneuve reports that Google handed over information on one of the users of its Orkut social network to Indian police.

After a request from Indian Law Enforcement, Google handed over the IP address of an Orkut user. The Indian Law Enforcement asked the ISP Airtel for information about the “owner” of that IP and Lakshmana Kailash K. was arrested. However, it turns out that Airtel did not hand over the correct information to Indian police, Mr. Kailash was released three weeks later.

According to Chris Sogian on his Cnet blog:

On August 31, Lakshmana Kailash K. was arrested in Bangalore, India, and charged with posting insulting images of a revered historical figure on the Internet. The police claimed that he had uploaded disrespectful images of Chhatrapati Shivaji, the Indian equivalent of George Washington.

Once Google divulged the IP address, a local ISP provided the identity. In the sense that they didn’t. LKK was not the right guy. So, Google gave it up to another foreign security service and they wound up getting the wrong guy.

Good job, Google. You’ve done Yahoo one better. It’s only a shame that Mr. Kailash only spent three weeks in jail instead of ten years. I have faith in you. Next time you give it up to a security force, I’m sure you’ll get it right.

According to Bloomberg and the New York Times, Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang “apologized to the mother of an imprisoned Chinese dissident during testimony at a heated Congressional hearing probing the company’s role in jailing the man.”

Hang on, now. For a year, Yang has been contemptuously dismissing his company’s actions with a tedious repetition of “respect” for the “laws” of the countries in which it operates. In other words, not only did Yahoo do nothing wrong, it did everything right. Then, when the worm began to turn, he and his shill Michael Callahan unconvincingly began to keen about how they didn’t have all the facts when they testified before Congress last year. And now, there’s something to apologize for?

Due to Yang’s lust for money, in 2005 Chinese journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison for using his Yahoo mail to send notes outside the country. The Chinese authorities stuck their hand out and Yang couldn’t kiss it fast enough. No legal need to comply with this request, much less a moral or even practical desire to maintain independence. No, Yang and his underlings forked over as fast as possible, in order to pleasure the authorities they believed would help them make yet more money.

Prior to that, in 2002 Wang Xiaoning was arrested for using a Yahoo account to advocate for open elections and other political freedoms in China. In both cases, Yahoo or its subsidiary handed over information it was not legally required to give. And even if it had been required, it could have chosen instead to forgo blood money. It did not.

U.S. Representative Tom Lantos, (D) California, a Holocaust survivor and the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, before which Yang testified today, was disgusted.

“A company of Yahoo’s resources should have taken every conceivable step to prevent the automatic compliance with a request from the Chinese police apparatus. To this day, Yahoo has failed to change any of its practices in order to prevent such collaboration.”

“While Mr. Callahan may not have known the relevant facts, other Yahoo employees, in fact, did know the nature of the Chinese investigation against Shi Tao prior to our committee hearing. (Yahoo’s actions were) spineless and irresponsible.”

“”I do not believe that America’s best and brightest companies should be playing integral roles in China’s notorious and brutal political repression apparatus.”

“Much of this testimony reveals that while technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies.”

“Yahoo shares fell 4.6 percent, or $1.43, to $29.93 in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading,” according to Bloomberg. Let’s hope the bottom falls out and the price of exchanging lives for yet more money is as high for these Corporate Collaborators as it was for Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning.

Watch video of the Committee’s meeting here. (If you can. It’s a “.smi” file, whatever that is. Doesn’t work for me.)

Update: Clark sent me a link to The World’s coverage. He also wrote a guest post about it on the Technology Review Blog.

It’s Twitter4Kareem today. Check out the CPB’s Twitter account and join us yourselves.

Kareem, whose full name is Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, is an Egyptian blogger who was sentenced to four years in prison for airing his critical views on Islam and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Imprisoning a college student for four years for shooting his mouth off is disgusting. Let Egypt and the world know that out of sight in this day and age is not out of mind.

Dr. Awab Alvi of Teeth Maestro is reporting on the ground from Karachi via Blackberry.

Ange Embuldeniya is handling the actual posting out of fear that the press crackdown following Musharraf’s “state of emergency” will soon result in a crackdown on bloggers. New York Times’ blog The Lede detailed the method in a recent post.

I asked the good doctor whether blogs had been effected yet. “Luckily no,” he said. “But we remain on the watch. The government has bigger fish to fry with private news channels before they turn on us.”

Subscribe to Dr. A’s feed for reports and photos of protests and actions on the street.

Even before the “state of emergency” was declared, Pakistan began lowering the boom on electronic communications, including blogs.

Update: Pakistani students have created the Emergency Times to give constant updates on the martial law situation in their country.