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Censorship Government Software United States News Technology

Cuba Is Blocking Text Messages That Contain Words Like 'Democracy' (theverge.com) 91

Posted by BeauHD from the free-speech dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Cuban government is blocking text messages that contain words such as "democracy," "human rights," and "hunger strike," according to an investigation from local dissidents. In a Spanish-language report published last week, prominent blogger Yoani Sanchez and journalist Reinaldo Escobar found that the government is filtering 30 keywords and blocking the transmission of any texts that contain them. Reuters later confirmed that messages containing the Spanish words for "democracy" and "human rights" did not reach their destination, nor did those containing Sanchez's name or "Somos Mas": an opposition group that worked on the investigation. Texts that included the word "protest" were transmitted, the agency reported on Tuesday, and those that were blocked were marked as "sent" on the sender's phone. It's not clear how long the communist government has been filtering keywords and blocking texts, and activists suspect that there may be more terms that it is targeting. Cuba has long been accused of committing human rights abuses, including arbitrary detentions and restrictions on freedom of speech. "We discovered not just us but the entire country is being censored," Eliecer Avila, the head of Somos Mas, tells Reuters. "It just shows how insecure and paranoid the government is."
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Cuba Is Blocking Text Messages That Contain Words Like 'Democracy' More

Cuba Is Blocking Text Messages That Contain Words Like 'Democracy'

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  • Cuban Firewall (Score:5, Funny)

    by zenlessyank ( 748553 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @08:12PM (#52844727)

    is state of the art I am sure. Have a cigar!

  • Democratic hunger strike for human rights! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Take THAT, amigo!

    Just hope Cuba doesn't end up like this

    http://www.rinconcete.com/imag... [rinconcete.com]

  • So is socialism, but mob rule is also a failure. These are just false ways of ruling ourselves that do not work, but we are afraid to abandon.

    What is best for Cuba? I do not know... but it is not socialist leaders, nor mob rule.

    • Government always rules with the consent of the governed, all that changes is the method of gaining that consent. Ballots are usually preferred by the populace, ruthless subjugation of dissent by the rulers.

      Democracy hasn't failed as a principle, just most of the implementations. In fact, some of the happiest nations with the (per capita) strongest economies in the world are socialist democracies, so exactly how have they failed?

      What has failed is most of the attempts to keep democracies democratic, espec

    • Democracy is the worst way to run a government, except for all the other types of government that have been tried.

      Name one form of government that has turned out better in practice than Democracy.

  • That's why the Cuban love the Castros so! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @08:15PM (#52844743)
    The sure sign of a treasured system of government and a joyous society: you're not allowed to talk about other people's way of life. Or leave.
  • This is a surprise? In Cuba? If you leave out failed states like Somalia, Cuba is not far behind NK. It is not a democracy by any stretch, it is a communist nation, and has a government and tactics similar to the olf USSR, and current China and Vietnam.

    I am curious why some of the Somos Mas leadership are not yet wearing Colombian neckties.

    • Cuba is efficient at constraining dissent, yet surprisingly less brutal about it than most dictatorships. They have political prisoners, but they never execute them anymore. Often they let them out of jail and just harass and disrupt them.

  • The Swedes (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The Swedes love Cuba. They go there by the boat load and clog up the beaches. They never leave the tourist areas though.

  • Evidence? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    > according to an investigation from local dissidents

    In other news, according to an investigation by local vegans, tofu tastes just as good as steak!

    • Have you ever received a text message from Cuba with the "banned" words? There is your evidence. /s

  • I'm not an encryption expert, nor have I ever been. I was a CDMA expert some 20 years ago, when Qualcomm was drinking their Ovaltine. Twitter is based on SMS (Short Message Service), as defined by the IS-95 spec. Every once in a while, defined by the slot cycle index, itself defined by the carrier (it's a tradeoff between battery life and how long the user waits for their phone to ring), the handset will query the base station "Hey bud, got anything for me?" and gets a yea/nay response. One of these m

    • Maybe you could defeat the filter using i33t sp33k. D3m0crACy ftw!

    • There's no reason you couldn't easily encrypt texts, so long as you trusted your phone. Encryption is basically a math function that takes two numbers: an encryption key, and a really long arbitrary number that's the message to be encrypted (say, the 150 bytes of a text interpreted as one 1200 bit number), and as a result it generates another number, generally roughly the same length as the input message.

      Decryption is a very similar process that takes a decryption key (sometimes, but not always, the same a

  • What about dem0cracy? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gussington ( 4512999 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @08:42PM (#52844851)
    We all know these things are trivial to bypass. Dem0cracy, Hemocracy, Lemocracy, Democray-cray, that's the beauty of language. Youse carn mekitup azz yo gogo un thur missage stil gitz throo. If all else fails send an MMS of the txt.

    • Re:What about dem0cracy? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @10:52PM (#52845547)
      So you'd really play change-the-spelling games with SMS when the local government has a habit of locking up people for saying the word out loud, and killing people who say it several times?

      • So you'd really play change-the-spelling games with SMS when the local government has a habit of locking up people for saying the word out loud, and killing people who say it several times?

        No revolution ever started through compliance. If it were me I'd be looking for something a little more sophisticated than simple letter shifting eg OTP is low tech but very robust.

        • I'm referring to the highly user-identifying nature of SMS.

          • I'm referring to the highly user-identifying nature of SMS.

            So am I. If you intercept my SMS: "XCVGP MTHYU FPOLW TUSHA", what does that mean to you? Without a OTP it is meaningless
            If I put in more than 5 minutes effort I would create a OTP that has built-in plausible deniability (eg using real phrase instead of random characters such as "pick up milk from the corner store after work please").
            My point is that screening for known dictionary words is amateur-hour security measures. It doesn't really stop anything other than the casual bystander (who is unlikely to be

  • Censorship Arms Race (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Time for some 31337 speak then eh?

  • Game the system like everyone else, Cuba (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Democracy is a fucking farce. We're brainwashed from birth it's the best system of government in the world but every Democracy has been captured by the elite. The people think they're empowered but at elections they only get to choose between one or two establishment candidates who looking after themselves and their donors and not the sucker who votes for them.

    So do what everyone else does, Cuba. Tell the punters the have a democracy, hold sham elections where only establishment candidates can win and boas

    • Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest.

      Please, name a single form of government that has been better in practice than Democracy.

  • Fuck em! (Score:2)

    by Chas ( 5144 )

    Darn
    Embargoes
    Mean
    Others
    Can
    Ruin
    All
    Civility.
    Yanno?

  • If there's anything kids these days are good at, it's taking common words and phrases we use in everyday speech and turning them into obscure undecipherable abbreviations for text messages.

  • ....is a communist country! Duh!

    • Not really relevant, even if it were true. Communism is just an economic policy (one currently essentially impossible to implement at scale)

      The statement you're looking for is "Cuba is a dictatorship!"

  • Crap so that means the Chinese can't listen to Guns N' Roses latest album?

  • Note that first of all this is not a "news" story. It's a bunch of charges made by one side in a deep political debate. There's no attempt at substantiation, and not even the pretense of the courtesy of allowing the other side to comment. Second, that so many fierce "independent thinkers" at Slashdot have just accepted the charges and assumed they must be true. Because after all everyone knows Cuba is bad, right? And how do we know? Because "a lot of people" say so. And you make fun of Trump supporte

  • Time for Cubans to install Signal.

  • It's just a matter of time.

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