A Sneak Peek at a Fractured Web
* Chinese Blogger Slams Microsoft * Progress Report for Net Censors
By Mark Anderson| Also by this reporter 02:00 AM Nov, 13, 2006
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- Internet censorship is spreading and becoming more sophisticated across the planet, even as users develop savvier ways around it, according to early results in the first-ever comprehensive global survey of internet censorship.
The internet watchdog organization OpenNet Initiative is compiling a year's worth of data gathered by nearly 50 cyberlaw, free-speech and network experts across as many countries, whose governments are known internet filterers.
The study systematically tested if, when, how and by whom thousands of controversial websites are blocked in each nation.
Last week, ONI researchers gathered at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School to begin hashing through their as-yet unpublished -- and in many cases, still incomplete -- findings. Wired News sat down with five members of the ONI team to catch a sneak preview of the study that, when it's published in the spring, is expected to set the gold standard for measuring freedom of expression across the internet.
The spectrum of internet censorship, the researchers found, ranged from transparent to utterly murky. Perhaps the country with the most accessible filtering system was Saudi Arabia, said Berkman Center research affiliate Helmi Noman.
"On their website, they have all the information of why they block and what they block," he said. "And they invite contributions (of other sites to be blocked) from the public."
Vietnam, on the other hand, floats decoys. As ONI first documented this summer and confirmed in this year's study, the Southeast Asian regime purports to censor sexually explicit content. But ONI's computers found no such blocking in place. They did find, however, plenty of unadvertised censorship of political and religious websites critical of the country's one-party state.
Sometimes a censoring government tries to conceal its filtering behind spoofed web-browser error messages. ONI discovered that Tunisia, for instance, masks filtered pages by serving a mockup of Internet Explorer's 404 error page. These supposed error pages stood out, because ONI doesn't use IE.
"Rather than getting a page that says 'This page has been blocked,' you get a page saying 'Page not found,' designed to look exactly like the Internet Explorer 404 page," said Cairo-based ONI consultant Elijah Zarwan.
Sometimes a censoring government apparently dips into the bag of tricks more commonly used by online extortionists and script kiddies. ONI researcher Stephen Murdoch of Cambridge University points to denial of service attacks on multiple opposition-party websites preceding countrywide elections in both Belarus and Kyrgyzstan.
Although ONI cannot prove the government was the instigator, the government benefited from the attacks. If the state had nothing to do with the denial-of-service carpet bombings, some mysterious third party took big risks acting malevolently on the state's behalf.
Indeed, speculates ONI researcher Nart Villeneuve of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, the difficulty in tracing the source may be why denial-of-service attacks may appear more and more attractive to governments. "There is some plausible deniability in a denial of service attack," he said. "Whereas if they send out a fax to internet service providers saying to block this site, and somebody leaks that fax, then we can directly prove that the government is blocking this site."
Government filtering is beginning to expand beyond the bounds of the web browser, too. Last summer, Bahrain blocked all access to Google Earth, before yielding to global political pressure from bloggers and lifting the ban.
Internet filtering can sometimes have clearly commercial motives, said Noman. "The (United Arab Emirates) block voice over IP, but they think they have a legal reason: The only telecommunications company in the country is the sole (legal) provider of telecommunications services. So going through the internet is a violation of the monopoly," he said.
However, government censors don't have a corner on innovation. The new generation of censorship circumvention hacks are coming online too, though they're typically known only by the tiny percentage of users who are also geeks.
Noman discussed a new breed of web browser and web applications that can use foreign web servers to disguise a user's IP address, and thus evade censorship protocols. He declines to mention any specific products, though, for fear of giving away too much information to the other side.
More prosaic workarounds exist too.
In Syria, Zarwan said, content from some blocked websites quickly translates into impromptu e-mail blasts from the website owners to its regular readers.
"E-mail and SMS are probably more important than the web for political organizing," he said.
One Syrian website used to "go after government members by name and was really fearless," said Zarwan. "It was quickly blocked. So they started sending (the site's content) out by e-mail. Then the government started blocking that e-mail address, and so he started a new e-mail address ... to the point where he was changing e-mail addresses three times a week."
In Egypt, Zarwan added, activists from the local pro-democracy group Kifaya performed a similar trick, only using Yahoo Groups instead of e-mail.
Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Iran, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus also have the distinction of making up the lion's share of Reporters Without Borders' new list of 13 Internet Enemies, released last week.
Reporters Without Borders' Julien Pain is one activist eager to see ONI's final report next spring.
"Five years ago, only a few countries censored the internet, or censored it at all efficiently," he said. "The first one to do that was China, and they were kind of a model for other dictatorships around the world."
But we see now that it's spreading all over the world, and even in sub-Saharan African countries," Pain said.
ONI is a collaboration between digital frontier organizations at Harvard University, the University of Toronto, Cambridge and Oxford Universities in the U.K.
Although many organizations, including ONI itself, have released progress reports on the state of internet censorship in individual countries, no one has to date attempted a comparative study of all of them at once.
ONI's past work has been extremely thorough and up to date, said Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch, so he expects the ONI survey will become the bellwether for internet free-speech researchers around the world.
"I've found their work to be very impressive, because it's such a complicated field," he said. "It's not like other fields where at least it's static enough that you can draw some straightforward conclusions. This is hard work."
One of ONI's worries, said project manager Rob Faris, is that the information it gathers will be used by censorious governments to refine their techniques and tighten their grip.
"One of the things that we could do inadvertently in our work is to create a compendium of websites that should have been blocked by the standards of that country that haven't been blocked," Faris said. "We don't want to do their work for them."