Political Censorship
A few notes for myself.
You are all welcome to check out the sites.
China tightening Online freedoms
Reporters without boarders
Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents
Blogging vs. Journalism
Electronic Fronteir Foundation
Combating CBDTPA
Tinsel-Town, a short Flash about CBDTPA
All for now, more later...
When Canadian Internet law expert Michael Geist tried to download his e-mail in a Beijing hotel room recently he ran into what he thought was nothing more than a technical hiccup.
"I'd be downloading and all of a sudden it would be cut off," said Geist. "And at first I thought it was a coincidence and the network had a glitch."
Well, no. It kept happening again and again.
Geist -- who holds the Canada Research chair in Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa -- had run smack into everyday Chinese censorship of the Internet.
What was happening, he later discovered, was that a filtering program was going through his e-mail word by word, term by term, and when it hit a something it didn't like, bam, goodbye to his download.
Geist started looking for methods to beat the system, which was also blocking his access to some websites...
So far, at least, the conventional wisdom is -- like that of Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) co-founder John Gillmore more than a decade ago -- that the Internet always manages to route around problems.
"It certainly has been the conventional wisdom," said Ronald Deibert, who director of The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies. "The problem is that the conventional wisdom is being increasingly challenged."
Deibert -- whose Citizen Lab is a member of the OpenNet Initiative that creates technological tools to help citizens evade state Internet censorship -- said that countries are becoming increasingly intent on and more adept at controlling online information.
Five years ago, he said, there were perhaps two countries -- China and Iran -- that were imposing Internet filtering and now there are dozens, including Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
He said that, as with any kind of censorship, only a small minority of people try to get around it.
"What happens in countries like China and Iran is that the government is secretive about it and yet there are stiff penalties for people caught violating those ambiguous regulations, said Deibert. "It creates a climate of self-censorship. In other words, people become very cautious because they're afraid."
Interestingly, said Deibert many countries use western technologies to do filtering, as shown by analysis by the OpenNet Initiative, which connects computers clandestinely to filtered networks.
OpenNet includes The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Program at Cambridge University.
"We have people who work with us inside countries, often at great risk to themselves," said Deibert. "They go into a hotel in the country, plug into the Internet and run tools that we provide for them and that we've kitted up on their laptops. What we're essentially doing is mapping the Internet infrastructure from the inside out."
The OpenNet Initiative recently discovered that a product called SmartFilter, marketed by United States-based Secure Computing, was being used in Iran, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
"So they definitely see a market and they're pushing their product," said Deibert. "Of course, they deny they've sold that particular product to Iran because there are sanctions against Iran right now in the United States. They say it might have been downloaded illegally."
Deibert said that Citizen Lab and OpenNet Initiative is developing new software called Psiphon to allow those in such places as China and Iran to get access to an uncensored Internet.
"The way our system works is if you have friends or family in a country where censoring takes place, you would have them connect with your computer with a couple of simple changes to their browser," said Deibert. "They wouldn't have to install anything. Then you would run a program on your computer that would allow them to surf through your computer."
There are other programs available for this. Circumventer, for example, allows those who install it on their computer to connect to proxies, which in turn access information and sidestep the filters.
"The problem is that the Chinese government is now aware that there is something called Circumventer, and so it's a cat-and-mouse game," said Deibert.
Not that long ago, said Deibert, the Voice of America, the U.S. State Department's propaganda arm, worked together with a company called Anonymizer to create a circumvention system for Iran.
"We connected two computers in Iran and connected them to the Anonymizer service and ran tests where we requested literally hundreds of thousands of Web sites."
What they found in place on the Voice of America software were porn filters that blocked sites by searching for such terms as "ass" which meant that if you tried to look up a U.S. embassy it was blocked.
"They had decided, somewhat mysteriously on their own -- there wasn't any public discussion about this -- that the American taxpayer wouldn't want Iranians surfing porn," said Deibert.
article found @ : http://www.news.utoronto.ca/inthenews/archive/2005_09_23.html
origanally: The Vancouver Sun
You are all welcome to check out the sites.
China tightening Online freedoms
Reporters without boarders
Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents
Blogging vs. Journalism
Electronic Fronteir Foundation
Combating CBDTPA
Tinsel-Town, a short Flash about CBDTPA
All for now, more later...
- The not-so-free Internet
When Canadian Internet law expert Michael Geist tried to download his e-mail in a Beijing hotel room recently he ran into what he thought was nothing more than a technical hiccup.
"I'd be downloading and all of a sudden it would be cut off," said Geist. "And at first I thought it was a coincidence and the network had a glitch."
Well, no. It kept happening again and again.
Geist -- who holds the Canada Research chair in Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa -- had run smack into everyday Chinese censorship of the Internet.
What was happening, he later discovered, was that a filtering program was going through his e-mail word by word, term by term, and when it hit a something it didn't like, bam, goodbye to his download.
Geist started looking for methods to beat the system, which was also blocking his access to some websites...
So far, at least, the conventional wisdom is -- like that of Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) co-founder John Gillmore more than a decade ago -- that the Internet always manages to route around problems.
"It certainly has been the conventional wisdom," said Ronald Deibert, who director of The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies. "The problem is that the conventional wisdom is being increasingly challenged."
Deibert -- whose Citizen Lab is a member of the OpenNet Initiative that creates technological tools to help citizens evade state Internet censorship -- said that countries are becoming increasingly intent on and more adept at controlling online information.
Five years ago, he said, there were perhaps two countries -- China and Iran -- that were imposing Internet filtering and now there are dozens, including Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
He said that, as with any kind of censorship, only a small minority of people try to get around it.
"What happens in countries like China and Iran is that the government is secretive about it and yet there are stiff penalties for people caught violating those ambiguous regulations, said Deibert. "It creates a climate of self-censorship. In other words, people become very cautious because they're afraid."
Interestingly, said Deibert many countries use western technologies to do filtering, as shown by analysis by the OpenNet Initiative, which connects computers clandestinely to filtered networks.
OpenNet includes The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Program at Cambridge University.
"We have people who work with us inside countries, often at great risk to themselves," said Deibert. "They go into a hotel in the country, plug into the Internet and run tools that we provide for them and that we've kitted up on their laptops. What we're essentially doing is mapping the Internet infrastructure from the inside out."
The OpenNet Initiative recently discovered that a product called SmartFilter, marketed by United States-based Secure Computing, was being used in Iran, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
"So they definitely see a market and they're pushing their product," said Deibert. "Of course, they deny they've sold that particular product to Iran because there are sanctions against Iran right now in the United States. They say it might have been downloaded illegally."
Deibert said that Citizen Lab and OpenNet Initiative is developing new software called Psiphon to allow those in such places as China and Iran to get access to an uncensored Internet.
"The way our system works is if you have friends or family in a country where censoring takes place, you would have them connect with your computer with a couple of simple changes to their browser," said Deibert. "They wouldn't have to install anything. Then you would run a program on your computer that would allow them to surf through your computer."
There are other programs available for this. Circumventer, for example, allows those who install it on their computer to connect to proxies, which in turn access information and sidestep the filters.
"The problem is that the Chinese government is now aware that there is something called Circumventer, and so it's a cat-and-mouse game," said Deibert.
Not that long ago, said Deibert, the Voice of America, the U.S. State Department's propaganda arm, worked together with a company called Anonymizer to create a circumvention system for Iran.
"We connected two computers in Iran and connected them to the Anonymizer service and ran tests where we requested literally hundreds of thousands of Web sites."
What they found in place on the Voice of America software were porn filters that blocked sites by searching for such terms as "ass" which meant that if you tried to look up a U.S. embassy it was blocked.
"They had decided, somewhat mysteriously on their own -- there wasn't any public discussion about this -- that the American taxpayer wouldn't want Iranians surfing porn," said Deibert.
article found @ : http://www.news.utoronto.ca/inthenews/archive/2005_09_23.html
origanally: The Vancouver Sun
posted by poweredbyantitrust at 10:22 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home