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The company said that between July and December 2011, it complied with 65% of court orders to remove content — but with only 47% of some 1,000 non-court requests from government agencies around the world; Google rejected 53% of those, including the Passport Canada request.

“We received a request from the Passport Canada office to remove a YouTube video of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet,” stated the Google report, which disclosed details about the Canadian case as one of the highlights in its semi-annual summary for the last half of 2011, released Sunday. “We did not comply with this request.”

The Canadian example was cited by Google, along with a handful of other requests from various countries — including Pakistan, Thailand and Poland — as representing a “troubling” pattern in which the search portal is being asked to suppress political speech.

“Unfortunately, what we’ve seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different,” said senior Google policy analyst Dorothy Chou said in a statement. “We noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it’s not.”

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Noting that the number of such requests from governments increased significantly in the latest six-month reporting period, Chou added: “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.”