Google Transparency Report: Government takedown requests up 103% in US," we've been asked to take down political speech.

Google Transparency Report: Government takedown requests up 103% in US,"Just like every other time before, we've been asked to take down political speech,". (Google).Google has released new data for its Transparency Report, which provides details of government requests to takedown content across the company’s websites and services.
The report — dated July-December 2011 — now includes details of government requests to take down blog posts, videos and other information on Google services during the period. It also includes all state-led requests to share other information, including user IP addresses.
Google calls the latest findings “troubling” and it notes that requests to remove political content are a trend that it is continuing to see, rather than the brief blip that it had optimistically hoped they were.
The headline focus is no doubt on the US, where Google says that it has seen a 103 percent increase in state-led takedown requests – the highest increase worldwide (CHANGE?).
Many of these are related to user’s private data, as a Google engineer explained to Forbes, and the majority were not actioned on, as the report explains."It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect -- Western democracies not typically associated with censorship."
Requests from Turkish information technologies officials centered on videos of the founder of modern-day Turkey, and Google responded by making the targeted clips unavailable in that country.

There’s little surprise that Pakistan, which controversially (and briefly) blocked Twitter last month, got in touch with Google about content on YouTube, albeit without success:

We received a request from the Government of Pakistan’s Ministry of Information Technology to remove six YouTube videos that satirized the Pakistan Army and senior politicians. We did not comply with this request.

Of the other requests, a bizarre one stands out from Canada:

We received a request from the Passport Canada office which unsuccessful sought to remove a YouTube video of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet.

As well as these new additions, Google has added a new category for trademark-related requests. This is presumably to reflect the increasing number of requests that it receives from brands, but it will also help distinguish business-related requests from the spicier and more sinister government led communication.Read the full story here.