Fwd: Fwd: The Geopolitics of Asian Cyberspace

[aph809]

This article on web censorship may be of interest.

Some ONI people made a presentation at Intl Development
Research Centre here in Ottawa.  Their in-country testing
of web access entails some very courageous people.  One
of their collaborators in a central Asian
country was attacked in a parking lot and his eyes
gouged out.

Andrew

>
> >The Geopolitics of Asian Cyberspace
>Far Eastern Economic Review V.169 N.10 December 2006
> >December 2006
> >
> >by Ronald Deibert
> >
> >What happens to your request when you click on a link to a Web site or send
> >an email?  For most surfers, the Internet experience begins and ends with
> >what happens on the computer screen in front of them.  However, if you
> >follow that email or Web request as it leaves your computer and passes down
> >the fiber-optic cable to the servers and routers of your local Internet
> >Service Provider (ISP), through the Internet Exchange Points (IXPS),
> >international gateways, and on to the undersea trunk cables of
> >telecommunications companies, you will find a complex and largely hidden
> >infrastructure of filters and choke points.
> >
> >
> >HARRY HARRISON
> >
> >Conventional wisdom had it that the Internet was an unstoppable force for
> >liberalization, with nondemocratic states powerless to control this
> >sprawling, seamless network of networks.  But this vast international
> >“underbelly” of the Internet —almost completely invisible to most Internet
> >users—has become an object of geopolitical contestation among states, and a
> >site where political power is being asserted.
> >
> >Perhaps nowhere is the geopolitical dynamic playing itself out more
> >forcefully than in the vast region of Asia. Home to one of the world’s
> >cyber-superpowers, China, and dozens of newly emerging markets eager to
> >capitalize on the benefits of new information and communication technology
> >(ICT) while limiting negative side-effects for centralized political
> >authority. Sophisticated ICT companies, many from the West, are following
> >the lead of Asian governments, offering a wide range of appropriate
> >products and services.
> >
> >This exercise of political power in cyberspace by states in Asia, however,
> >is not going uncontested. A swarming resistance movement of tech-savvy
> >citizens is forming to protect the Web as an unfettered forum of freedom of
> >speech and access to information. With the development of new software
> >tools designed to circumvent censorship, they are taking the battle to the
> >Internet’s inner core.
> >
> >Perhaps the best window on the dark underbelly of the Internet comes from
> >the research of a project I direct: the OpenNet Initiative (ONI)—a
> >collaboration among the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the
> >Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the Cambridge
> >Security Programme, the Oxford Internet Institute, and partner NGOs
> >worldwide. The aim of the ONI is to document empirically patterns of
> >Internet censorship and surveillance worldwide using sophisticated means of
> >technically interrogating the Internet directly.  The ONI’s tests are
> >carried out both remotely from North America and the United Kingdom, and in
> >the field by dozens of local researchers. Our reports over the last several
> >years have documented a disturbing increase in the scale, scope and
> >sophistication of Internet censorship practices worldwide, including in
> Asia.
> >
> >When the ONI was formed in 2002, only a handful of countries were known to
> >engage in Internet content filtering, most prominently China, Iran and
> >Saudi Arabia.  Now more than four years later, the ONI is presently testing
> >in more than 40 countries worldwide. China is still the world’s most
> >notorious and sophisticated censoring regime. Its filtering system
> >comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control, the
> >latter implemented primarily at the backbone level using specially
> >configured Cisco routers. The system involves numerous state agencies and
> >thousands of public and private personnel, and a dense web of
> >ever-thickening legal restrictions.
> >
> >However, China is not alone. Among countries that the ONI has researched in
> >Asia, we have technically confirmed Internet content filtering in Burma,
> >Vietnam, the Maldives, Thailand, South Korea, Singapore, Pakistan and
> >India. Although we have not yet conducted tests in North Korea, it is well
> >known that what little Internet exists in the country is heavily filtered.
> >Likewise, Australia filters Web content through official takedown notices
> >issued to ISPs by the government. In Central Asia, we have also identified
> >extensive Internet censorship practices in Uzbekistan, and intermittent or
> >targeted filtering in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
> >
> >Mission Creep
> >
> >Although many countries justify their censorship practices as a way to
> >block access to pornography or other culturally sensitive material, our
> >research has documented a large and growing swath of content beyond
> >pornography that is targeted for filtering.
> >
> >In China, Burma, Uzbekistan and Vietnam, for example, ISPs routinely filter
> >access to the Web sites of local opposition parties, dissident and
> >independence movements, and human-rights and religious groups.  Free email,
> >Web-hosting, and blogging services; online encyclopedias (such as the
> >popular Wikipedia, in the case of China); privacy and security tools; and
> >instant messaging clients are also targeted for filtering. Other countries
> >appear to be following this path. In Thailand, for example, what started
> >out as an effort to block pornography has been gradually broadened to
> >include politically-sensitive Web sites as well, particularly since the
> >September 2006 military coup. Pakistan began filtering sites that contain
> >imagery offensive to Islam, and now targets sites related to the
> >Balochistan independence movement as well. The Thailand and Pakistan cases
> >may suggest that once the tools of censorship are put in place, the
> >temptation for authorities to employ them secretly for a wide range of
> >ulterior purposes may be large —particularly in circumstances where there
> >is little civilian oversight or accountability—a phenomenon we refer to as
> >Internet censorship “mission creep.”
> >
> >The ONI has also documented a more concentrated effort among states to
> >target content in local languages, such as Vietnamese, Mandarin, Arabic and
> >Farsi. For example, our in-country tests in China compared search results
> >for keywords in both English and Chinese and found a much higher rate of
> >inaccessibility for contentious Chinese keywords.  Phrases such as “Chinese
> >Labour Party,” “China Democracy Party,” “Party for Freedom and Democracy in
> >China,” and “Inner Mongolian People’s Party” are less likely to be
> >accessible in Chinese than English. The same variation rates of
> >inaccessibility were also found in Vietnam and Iran. Although determining
> >the motivation for such variation is difficult, one might surmise that
> >political authorities may want to target that web content which hits
> >closest to home while leaving English speaking visitors to the country
> >(e.g., journalists, Western human-rights activists) with the impression
> >that censorship is rare.
> >
> >The increased sophistication of Internet content filtering practices can be
> >attributed, in part, to the services provided by Western (mostly
> >U.S.-based) software and Internet service firms. Whereas once the best and
> >brightest of Silicon Valley were associated with wiring the world, and
> >opening up access to vast stores of information, today they are just as
> >likely to be known for doing the opposite. Although Microsoft, Cisco,
> >Yahoo!, Skype, and Google have all come under scrutiny for colluding with
> >China’s Internet censorship practices, perhaps the most significant,
> >serious, and yet overlooked contribution to Internet censorship by Western
> >corporations comes from the manufacturers of the filtering software used to
> >block content.
> >
> >Internet security companies like Fortinet, Secure Computing and Websense
> >create off-the-shelf filtering products that block access to categorized
> >lists of Web sites. While these products are primarily marketed to
> >businesses, they have been readily employed by censoring states like Tunisa
> >(Secure Computing), Iran (Secure Computing), Burma (Fortinet), and Yemen
> >(Websense) to block access to politically sensitive content.
> >
> >Just like businesses that do not want their employees to view gambling or
> >sport sites on company time, these governments simply tick off those
> >categories of Web sites they do not want their citizens to access, such as
> >“advocacy groups” or “militancy and extremist groups”—two categories in
> >Websense’s database. The former is defined by Websense as “sites that
> >promote change or reform in public policy, public opinion, social practice,
> >economic activities and relationships,” while the latter is defined as
> >“sites that offer information about or promote or are sponsored by groups
> >advocating antigovernment beliefs or action.”
> >
> >Digital Deceit
> >
> >One troubling trend identified has been the lack of accountability and
> >transparency over Internet-content filtering practices by states that
> >censor. While there is certainly a legitimate debate to be had about the
> >balance between a state’s right to cultural sovereignty and the free flow
> >of information, unfortunately most states do not allow such a debate to
> >take place prior to filtering, and have been shown to be deceitful about
> >the content they block and the filtering practices they employ.
> >
> >While some authorities yield clearly labeled blockpages to users who
> >request banned content, others are not so transparent. In China, for
> >example, ONI researchers found through forensic analysis that China’s
> >backbone routers are configured such that requests for banned content
> >result in a network timeout error. The routers then send packets to the
> >user’s machine effectively blocking that user’s unique IP address for an
> >indefinite period of time such that any further requests for any web
> >content on the same server results in a network timeout error. Among some
> >ISPs in Uzbekistan, requests for search engines or political opposition Web
> >sites are redirected to search engine Web sites. In Tunisia, “spoofed” Web
> >sites are returned instead of blockpages to give the appearance of network
> >errors instead of deliberate filtering. In Kyrgyzstan and Belarus, ONI
> >researchers found troubling patterns of inaccessibility to opposition Web
> >sites during election periods in each of those countries—inaccessibility we
> >traced to denial of service attacks or what appears to be deliberate
> >tampering with domain name servers. The latter cases suggest a new form of
> >“just-in-time” filtering which is less easy to verify or attribute
> >responsibility but just as effective in blocking access to politically
> >sensitive sites. The authorities leave the Internet open, in other words,
> >but turn the tap off only at critical periods, such as during elections or
> >public demonstrations.
> >
> >Adding to problems concerning lack of transparency and accountability is
> >the use of proprietary filtering software outlined above. The manufacturers
> >that make the commercial products used to block access to information treat
> >their blacklists as trade secrets, revealing only general categories or
> >sample Web sites to the public. This combination of proprietary software
> >tools and nondemocratic regimes creates a kind of double bind of
> >unaccountability.
> >
> >Protecting the Net
> >
> >Perhaps the most powerful way to protect the net, however, is by taking the
> >battle to the underbelly of the Internet itself —by creating technologies
> >that help secure, rather than undermine—access to information and freedom
> >of speech.
> >
> >At the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, our contribution comes in
> >the form of a simple censorship circumvention program called psiphon,
> >released on Dec. 1, 2006. The software works by having people who live in
> >uncensored countries, like Canada or the U.S., install a psiphon server on
> >their home computer, and then give the connection information to a few
> >friends or family members that live inside censored countries. Because each
> >psiphon node runs separately on private computers, and the connections
> >among psiphon users and servers are encrypted, it is extremely difficult
> >for authorities to block.
> >
> >Psiphon will allow individuals to bypass their government’s filters, and
> >connect to the Internet the way it was originally meant to be experienced.
> >Rather than set the bar at the lowest common country denominator, psiphon
> >sets it at the highest, most open Internet standard, allowing individuals
> >themselves to determine what information they can or will not access,
> >rather than deferring such a choice to bureaucratic elites. Yet psiphon and
> >other similar software are not magic bullets that will end Internet
> >censorship once and for all. The job of preserving the Internet as an open
> >global commons of information is a constant cat and mouse game between
> >citizens who want access to information and authorities that want to
> >control and limit it.
> >
> >But even so, these grass-roots technological efforts—that shore up the
> >Internet’s infrastructure as a medium that supports, rather than detracts
> >from, human rights—may be citizens’ best weapons in the ongoing
> >geopolitical battles over cyberspace.
> >
> >Mr. Deibert is director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for
> >International Studies at the University of Toronto, and a principal
> >investigator of the OpenNet Initiative. The psiphon software can be
> >downloaded from http://psiphon.civisec.org/.

Andrew Hubbertz
Librarian Emeritus
University of Saskatchewan Library

613 692 2709
[hidden email]