State-led Net censorship increasing
p2pnet.net news:- State-led censorship of the Net is increasing everywhere with America providing much of the filtering technology, says the Open Net Initiative.
“In the early days, countries used relatively crude blocking mechanisms at the national backbone level, or imposed restrictions upon ISPs that were applied in uneven ways,” says Ronald Deibert, director of Canada’s Citizen Lab, a member of the group. “Now we see first and foremost that many countries are using commercial filtering technologies, most of which are made by US companies. That’s providing them with a finer-grain level of service.”
The scale, scope and sophistication of state-based filtering have increased significantly, says a report just issued by the ONI, a partnership including the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme at Cambridge University, and the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.
The ONI chart on the right shows web sites which provide email, Net hosting, search, translation, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone service, and circumvention methods.
“No data” sections display in grey. “No data” doesn’t necessarily mean absence of filtering practices.
“Over the course of five years, we’ve gone from just a few places doing state-based technical filtering, like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, to more than two dozen,” the MIT Technology Review has Berkman Center executive director John Palfrey staying. “As Internet censorship and surveillance grow, there’s reason to worry about the implications of these trends for human rights, political activism, and economic development around the world.”
China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia remain the top blockers, says the report.
According to the MIT post, each of these countries filters not only pornography, but also political, human-rights, religious, and cultural sites, “deemed subversive by those countries’ governments”.
Other countries are more selective in what they let citizens see or not see, it goes on, saying “Syria and Tunisia, for example, filter a great deal of political content, while Burma and Pakistan target websites that pertain to national-security issues”.
“The South Koreans block several North Korean websites,” says Nart Villeneuve, director of technical research at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.
“They even tamper with the system so that when you try to access one of those North Korean sites, the URL resolves to a South Korean police page telling you, ‘What you’re trying to access is illegal, and we know your IP [Internet protocol] address.’” (An IP address could be used to locate the computer where the search is conducted, with the ultimate goal of identifying the individual involved.)
But, the MIT Technical Review has Deibert stating, the most pernicious for a filtering is “event-based” filtering.
By way of example, “Before the elections in March of 2006, Deibert notes, Belarus wasn’t blocking Internet content by technical means. Instead, the country’s strict laws regarding online content kept many Belarusians critical of the government in check.
“Then, at the time of key moments in the election, ONI realized that opposition websites were suddenly inaccessible inside the country. This led Deibert to believe that for just this brief period of time, laws designed to promote self-censorship weren’t enough. The government had indeed started blocking content.
“This is a harbinger of what’s to come worldwide,” Deibert says. “You’ll have filtering just during critical times, such as elections. Countries realize they risk becoming pariahs, and so they’ll find more surreptitious ways of filtering.”
Cambodia recently took this kind of censorship beyond the confines of the computer, when it ordered that cell-phone text-messaging services be cut off during elections, says the story adding the ONI is, “already thinking of ways to incorporate this kind of filtering into future studies”.
p2pnet carries a link (in red text at the bottom of each page) to psiphon, a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies. It allows people in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor.
Also See:
MIT Technology Review – Internet Increasingly Censored, May 18, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by goverment restrictions, try psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
