Summary: On The Listening Post this week: Google’s planned Chinese search app comes under fire – not least from its own staff. Plus, surveillance and censorship in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Bowing to Beijing? Google's Project Dragonfly A few weeks back, we learned Google was working on something called ‘Project Dragonfly’, a new search engine for the Chinese market – one that would function in compliance with Beijing’s strict rules on censorship. In an organisation that talks up transparency - it is ironic that only a handful of the company's employees knew about the project. When some of them caught wind of it - they leaked the details to an online news site, The Intercept. Google has ventured into China before, in 2010. But back then it decided it couldn’t live with the censorship rules. So it pulled out. This potential re-entry into China signals a major policy u-turn, involving one the biggest tech companies on the planet and the world’s largest market. Contributors Ryan Gallagher - Investigative Journalist, The Intercept Yuan Yang - Beijing Economy and Tech Correspondent, Financial Times Siva Vaidhyanathan - Professor of Modern Media Studies, University of Virginia Ann Lee - Economist, New York University On our radar Richard Gizbert speaks to producer Johanna Hoes about an informative CNN report covering aspects of the war in Yemen that don’t usually get much attention from the media. Censored and Surveilled: The Digital Occupation of Palestinians Palestinian journalists and activists are faced with two inescapable realities: surveillance and censorship. Since 2015, the authorities in Israel have arrested an estimated one thousand Palestinians for content published or shared online and the state has also taken down hundreds of Palestinian social media accounts - developing algorithms and a “predictive policing” program that monitors Palestinians in anticipation of them committing a ‘crime’. But Palestinians also have to contend with their own authorities, the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, neither of which is known for tolerating dissent or criticism online. The Listening Post's Tariq Nafi reports from the Occupied West Bank. Contributors Nadim Nashif - Executive Director of 7amleh, The Arab Center for Social Media Advancement Naela Khalil - West Bank Bureau Chief, Al Araby Al Jadeed Rania Muhareb - Legal Researcher, Al Haq Elia Zureik - Professor Emeritus in Sociology, Queen's University, Canada More from The Listening Post on: YouTube - http://aje.io/listeningpostYT Facebook - http://facebook.com/AJListeningPost Twitter - http://twitter.com/AJListeningPost Website - http://aljazeera.com/listeningpost - Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish - Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera - Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/
