But the most interesting result was due to the combination of attacks, surveillance and censorship Google has decided to reassess their operations in China:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

Wow.

The connection between censorship, surveillance and attacks is the key. Censorship, such as the blocking of web sites, is fairly crude but effective when combined with targeted surveillance and attacks. While many, especially the technically savvy, can circumvent China’s filtering system, the “GFW”, using tools such as Psiphon and Tor most Chinese citizens do not. The GFW doesn’t have to be 100% technically effective, it just has to serve as a reminder to those in China about what content is acceptable and that which should be avoided. The objective is to influence behaviour toward self-censorship, so that most will not actively seek out banned information of the means to bypass controls and access it.

The nexus of censorship, surveillance and malware attacks allows China is the key to China’s information control policies. It is not just about the GFW. Internet users in China face complex threats that are heavily dependent on additional factors, such as involvement in political activities, that involve targeted attacks and surveillance. China chooses when, where and how to exercise this granular control.

The InfoWar Monitor — which is a partnership between the Citizen Lab, Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto and The SecDev Group (and SecDev.cyber which focuses on Internet threats) — has been focusing on these threats. For example, in a report “Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s TOM-Skype platform” we documented how Tom-Skype (the Chinese version of Skype) was censoring and capturing politically sensitive content. In “Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network” we documented targeted malware attacks that compromised over 1,295 infected computers in 103 countries, 30% of which are high-value targets, including ministries of foreign affairs, embassies, international organizations, news media, and NGOs.

Google’s decision to re-asses their operations in China is courageous. I strongly hope that Microsoft, Yahoo! and others follow Google’s lead — as, to their credit, they have done in the past. In “Search Monitor Project: Toward a Measure of Transparency” I compared the censorship practices of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft as well as the domestic Chinese search engine Baidu and found that all followed Google’s lead to some extent by at least disclosing their censorship practices to their users. I hope that they stand by Google.

China, the ball is in your court.

The 0s and 1s of Computer Warfare – Op-Ed by Evgeny Morozov. My favourite quote: “A serious international debate about cybersecurity is impossible if our only reference points are “digital Pearl Harbors” and “e-Katrinas.” ”

Lawmaker Wants ‘Show of Force’ Against North Korea for Website Attacks – Wired. My favourite quote: “They’re reaching the conclusion that this was a state act and that “this couldn’t be some amateurs,” claimed Hoekstra, in direct opposition to what security experts have actually been saying. ”

In you’re going to Defcon, go to:

0-day, gh0stnet and the inside story of the Adobe JBIG2 vulnerability

Joint Strike Fighter – The same WaPo reporter behind the “electricity grid hack” story strikes again. This time with at least a few interesting details. What I found interesting is the mention of the fact that the attacks were reportedly on allies, such as Turkey, that are part of the development and on contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman Corp. and BAE Systems PLC. (more here).

“Technology, Policy, Law, and Ethics Regarding U.S. Acquisition and Use of Cyberattack Capabilities” — I haven’t read it in detail yet, but it looks very interesting. the best line so far: “Today’s policy and legal framework for guiding and regulating the U.S. use of cyberattack is ill-formed, undeveloped, and highly uncertain.”

Insider Threat — This is something I’ve been focusing on recently, but here is a report which suggests that “37% of employees would become insiders given the right incentive”.

• contentfilter*.log – ip, username, message, date, time (+ unknown parameters)‏
• skypecallinfo*.log – ip, username, version, username/phone number, date, time (+ unknown parameters)‏
• skypelogininfo*.log – ip, version, username, date, time
• skypenewuser*.log – ip, version, username, date, time
• skypenewusersendmoneytest*.log – unable to decrypt
• skypeonlineinfo*.log – ip, username, version date, time (+ unknown parameters)‏
• skypeversion*.log – version, ip, date, time (not encrypted)‏

The function of each logs is pretty self-explanatory based on the name of the file. In addition to the “contentfilter” logs, the “skypecallinfo” logs were very important as these files contain a record of who called who (skype usernames or phone numbers). In total, between the “skypecallinfo” logs and the “contentfilter” logs there are upwards of 4.5 million unique skype usernames or phone numbers in the logs I was able to download.

This doesn’t tell us anything about possible wiretapping with Skype or whether or not voice calls (other than the call data record in “skypecallinfo”) can be logged in other ways. Still, in many cases just knowing who is talking to who is as valuable as the content of the conversation itself.

CHINA’S TOP surveillance tsar has been has been arrested for taking bribes and framing a business rival, a move that has inspired and gratified both local bloggers and foreign journalists used to stultifying censorship regulations, and prompted questions at senior levels of the Communist Party about how the “Great Firewall of China” is enforced.

Unfortunately, the article itself has some of the typical nonsense seen in many articles about surveillance in China such as:

But China has tens of thousands of “net nannies”, who read every e-mail, web posting or search for “Dalai Lama”, and they are a huge impediment to reporting in China.

I wish they’d think about what “read every e-mail” means.

Skype President Josh Silverman writes:

What have you learned from TOM about the uploading and storing of certain chats, and what are you doing about it?

What we have discovered in our conversations with TOM is that they in fact were required to do this by the Chinese government.

The AFP reports:

Skype said it learned just Wednesday that a previously disclosed text filter operated by TOM-Skype, a joint venture between Chinese mobile firm TOM Online and Skype, had been altered.

“Last night, we learned that this practice was changed without our knowledge or consent and we are extremely concerned,” Skype, which is owned by US online auction house eBay, said.

“We deeply apologise for the breach of privacy relating to chat messages on TOM’s servers in China and we are urgently addressing this situation with TOM,” the company said.

AFP

Skype president Josh Silverman said in a statement that TOM Online “just like any other communications company in China, has established procedures to meet local laws and regulations.

“These regulations include the requirement to monitor and block instant messages containing certain words deemed ‘offensive’ by the Chinese authorities,” Silverman said.

“It is common knowledge that censorship does exist in China and that the Chinese government has been monitoring communications in and out of the country for many years,” he said.

He recalled that in April 2006, Skype admitted that TOM Online “operated a text filter that blocked certain words in chat messages” and unsuitable messages were to be “discarded and not displayed or transmitted anywhere.”

“It was our understanding that it was not TOM’s protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords, and we are now inquiring with TOM to find out why the protocol changed,” he said.

“We are currently addressing the wider issue of the uploading and storage of certain messages with TOM,” Silverman said, stressing that the millions of people around the world using standard Skype software were unaffected.

How were you able to determine that messages containing keywords were being uploaded to a web server? How did you find and decrypt the messages?

Wireshark. Every time I typed the word “fuck” an HTTP connection was made to a TOM Skype server. I visited the URL directly in Firefox, cut off the file name and was able to view the contents of the directory. With a little poking around I found the encryption key. A few lines of Python and voila. I did not “crack” anything nor was there any “elite” hackery — just plain, simple stuff.

Is “normal” Skype affected?

No. The Skype software downloaded from skype.com is not affected by the behavior. The only time “normal” Skype users are affected is when they communicate with TOM-Skype users.

What is TOM-Skype and what is the difference between it and Skype?

If you go to www.skype.com from China, you are redirected to skype.tom.com — so that’s version most Chinese people will use.

In 2004 Skype developed a relationship with TOM Online, a leading wireless provider in China, and announced a joint venture in 2005. Skype and TOM Online produced a special version of the Skype software, known as TOM-Skype, for use in China.

What is Skype saying, have they said anything to you?

I contacted Skype to have the security issue fixed before the report was released. So, they have configured the servers so that one can no longer view the logs and they have deleted sensitive files, such as the one containing the encryption key. Other than that contact, I’ve only seen the
statements they’ve made to reporters.

The NYT:

Jennifer Caukin, an eBay spokeswoman, said, “The security and privacy of our users is very important to Skype.” But the company spoke to the accessibility of the messages, not their monitoring. “The security breach does not affect Skype’s core technology or functionality,” she said. “It exists within an administrative layer on Tom Online servers. We have expressed our concern to Tom Online about the security issue and they have informed us that a fix to the problem will be completed within 24 hours.” EBay had no comment on the monitoring.

To the WSJ

Jennifer Caukin, a spokeswoman for Skype, said in an emailed statement that the security problem had been remedied as a result of the new report. The idea that China’s government “might be monitoring communications in and out of the country shouldn’t surprise anyone,” Ms. Caukin said. “Nevertheless, we were very concerned to hear about the apparent security issue” that enabled people to view user information, and “we are pleased that, once we informed TOM about it, that they were able to fix the flaw.”

In a separate statement, TOM Group said that “as a Chinese company, we adhere to rules and regulations in China where we operate our businesses.”

The WSJ blog, has the statement in full.

In the past Skype stated:

The text filter operates on the chat message content before it is encrypted for transmission, or after it has been decrypted on the receiver side. If the message is found unsuitable for displaying, it is simply discarded and not displayed or transmitted anywhere.

What I found directly contradicts this.

How does this relate to Corporate Social Responsibility (and the voluntary Principles of Free Expression and Privacy process)?

This case demonstrates the critical importance of the issues of transparency and accountability by providers of communications technologies. It highlights the risks of storing personally identifying and sensitive private information in jurisdictions where human rights and privacy are under threat. It also illustrates the need to assess the security, privacy and human rights impact of such a decision.

Some companies, such as Google, has stated that while the censor some search results they “will not maintain on Chinese soil any services, like email, that involve personal or confidential data.”

In this case Skype appears to have delegated all of the censorship and surveillance responsibilities to TOM – I don’t think they read Rebecca’s paper; they should. While examining the Yahoo! China – Shi Tao case she warned:

Companies that choose to ignore the broader human rights implications of their business practices are gambling with their long-term global reputations as trustworthy conduits or repositories of people’s personal communications and information.

Are the “key words” censored? Or are the messages just logged?

The only key word that I could use to trigger the content filter (the messages is not displayed to the user) and have logged in the content filter logs (uploaded to the tom-skype server) was “fuck” (and variations like f*ck). If a message contains the word “fuck” it is not displayed to the user (the entire message is not displayed) and the entire message is uploaded and logged.

In the same content filter logs I found that the majority of the logged messages did not contain obscenities, like fuck. However, many of the messages contained words like “Communist Party”, I counted the number of logged messages that contained these words, from that I identified what I think are key words. It is unclear if these messages are just logged, or are censored and logged.

Post questions in the comments and I’ll try to answer them :)

Our investigation reveals troubling security and privacy breaches affecting TOM-Skype—the Chinese version of the popular voice and text chat software Skype. It also raises troubling questions regarding how these practices are related to the Government of China’s censorship and surveillance policies.

The questionable security practices of TOM-Online led to the disclosure of millions of records containing personal information regarding mobile phone accounts, SMS messages, and the usage of TOM-Skype. However, this disclosure also confirms that TOM-Skype is censoring and logging text chat messages that contain specific, sensitive keywords and may be engaged in more targeted surveillance.

These findings raise key questions. To what extent do TOM Online and Skype cooperate with the Chinese government in monitoring the communications of activists and dissidents as well as ordinary citizens? On what legal basis is TOM-Skype capturing and logging this volume and detail of personal user data and communication, and who has access to it?

Full Report (mirror)

Major Findings

• The full text chat messages of TOM-Skype users, along with Skype users who have
communicated with TOM-Skype users, are regularly scanned for sensitive keywords, and
if present, the resulting data are uploaded and stored on servers in China.

• These text messages, along with millions of records containing personal information, are
stored on insecure publicly-accessible web servers together with the encryption key required to
decrypt the data.

• The captured messages contain specific keywords relating to sensitive political topics such
as Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Communist Party
of China.

• Our analysis suggests that the surveillance is not solely keyword-driven. Many of the
captured messages contain words that are too common for extensive logging, suggesting
that there may be criteria, such as specific usernames, that determine whether messages are
captured by the system.

For purposes on comparison Google and Microsoft make a good match because both have to de-list web sites form search results while Yahoo! and Baidu index form within China and thus do not (usually) index sites already censored by China. (For more read my report on search engine comparison.)

Now over a month later things have changed. While these sites remain accessible in China some are still censored by the search engines. Google has dropped to only censoring two sites and is now censoring the least amount of content. Baidu is next with three censored sites. Microsoft remained steady, but Yahoo! has shifted from censoring the least amount of sites to the most!

The divergence between Yahoo! and Baidu is very interesting. If both crawl from within China and are subject to China’s filtering why is Yahoo! censoring so much more than Baidu? It could be that the conclusion that Yahoo! and Baidu do not de-list content is not fully accurate. If the sites are accessible in China then Yahoo! is likely de-listing the sites. Because of the suboptimal method of censorship notification employed by Yahoo! (a standard disclaimer on every page regardless of whether any of the results are censored or not) I cannot fully distinguish between sites that are de-listed and sites that have not been indexed (e.g. because China blocks them).

I’m still struck by the fact that over a month later sites that are available and uncensored in China are still censored by these search engines.

Plans to tear down the so-called Great Firewall of China were being debated and a decision was expected soon, said Wang Hui, head of media relations for the organising committee…

“I believe you will be able to (access banned sites such as the BBC) but I can’t give you a promise yet. The relevant government departments are still working on it,” she said.

That’s something to keep an eye on for sure.

An article in The Guardian discusses the rapid growth of Internet usage in China the related effects. The article discusses how the Internet, and blogs in particular, have created “competing public opinions.” This is an interesting way to frame the topic as censorship in China is often characterized as monolithic when in fact there is a significant amount of competition in the realm of ideas. Even within a confined informational space there is considerable movement — what I’ve called wiggle room in the past — if one looks for it.

However, the article repeats the charge that China is exporting their Internet censorship technology:

Campaigners suspect China is passing its censorship know-how to Cuba, Vietnam and several African countries.

Now, I don’t doubt that others are looking at the forms of control China is applying to the Internet and evaluating how they too can keep the benefits, particularly economic, that come with the Internet while minimizing its use for free expression but I’m not so sure that this means that China is actively exporting censorship technology. As it currently stands, ONI found no filtering in Zimbabwe despite reports to the contrary. While Vietnam does censor the Internet it does so in a very different way than China does. Cuba may conduct a limited amount of filtering, but it is also much different than that in China. RSF reported:

There is hardly any censorship of the Internet in Internet cafes. Tests carried out by Reporters Without Borders showed that most Cuban opposition websites and the sites of international human rights organisations can be accessed using the “international” network. In China, filtering for key-words makes it impossible to access webpages containing “subversive” words. But, by testing a series of banned terms in Internet cafes, Reporters Without Borders was able to established that no such filtering system has been installed in Cuba.

While not ruling out the possibility, I am skeptical of this claim based on my experience with testing filtering systems in these countries. (What’s more interesting is that Comcast’s filtering in the USA is more like the GFW than any of these countries.)

The New York Times published an article that looks at the resistance to Internet censorship in China. It picks up on the theme of backlash that I’ve suggested comes about when over blocking occurs. When common web sites and services are blocked, it helps turn normally apolitical people into activists. The NYT reports:

For a vast majority of Internet users, censorship still does not appear to be much of a factor. The most popular Web applications here are games and messaging services, and the most visited Internet sites focus on everyday subjects like entertainment news and sports. Many, in fact, seem only vaguely aware that China’s Internet universe is carefully pruned, and even among those who know, a majority hardly seems to care.

But growing numbers of others are becoming increasingly resentful of restrictions on a wide range of Web sites, including Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace (sometimes), Blogspot and many other sites that the public sees as sources of harmless diversion or information. The mounting resentment has inspired a wave of increasingly determined social resistance of a kind that is uncommon in China.

The Financial Times reports that Guo Quan, a Chinese scholar, is planning to sue Google because a search for his name in google.cn is censored. If some one gives me the proper Chinese translation for his name I can check this out further. (In English it returns results, using 郭泉 results are also returned along with Google’s standard censorship notification. The name itself is a censored term as a search for it with a non-existent domain will produce the censorship notification as well. Yahoo.cn and Baidu produce no results. They will produce results if something is appended to the search (yahoo.cn, baidu)

The Atlantic published an article on censorship in China (it seems to be gone now, here are links to Google’s cache: 1, 2, 3, 4) that takes on the challenge of explaining the technical measures used to censor the Internet. The article also discusses circumvention and the self-censorship component that is so integral. The article concludes with some salient points regarding the important role of domestic censorship as well as the widening space for dialog:

It would be wrong to portray China as a tightly buttoned mind-control state. It is too wide-open in too many ways for that. “Most people in China feel freer than any Chinese people have been in the country’s history, ever,” a Chinese software engineer who earned a doctorate in the United States told me. “There has never been a space for any kind of discussion before, and the government is clever about continuing to expand space for anything that doesn’t threaten its survival.” But it would also be wrong to ignore the cumulative effect of topics people are not allowed to discuss.

However, the are several issues with the technical analysis as well as underlying tones of “exceptionlism” that obscure some of the bigger picture issues.There seems to be confusion over surveillance and filtering. Its best to think of filtering a set of rules, if packets contain something that violates the rules certain actions are taken. If a destination IP address is on a block list, the connection is not made, if packets contain certain keywords reset packets are sent to the source and destination to terminate the connection. Surveillance implies that someone is watching the traffic, or more logically it is stored, parsed and then someone looks at it. When surveillance and filtering are (con)fused together you get something strange like this:

Thus Chinese authorities can easily do something that would be harder in most developed countries: physically monitor all traffic into or out of the country. They do so by installing at each of these few “international gateways” a device called a “tapper” or “network sniffer,” which can mirror every packet of data going in or out. This involves mirroring in both a figurative and a literal sense. “Mirroring” is the term for normal copying or backup operations, and in this case real though extremely small mirrors are employed. Information travels along fiber-optic cables as little pulses of light, and as these travel through the Chinese gateway routers, numerous tiny mirrors bounce reflections of them to a separate set of “Golden Shield” computers.Here the term’s creepiness is appropriate. As the other routers and servers (short for file servers, which are essentially very large-capacity computers) that make up the Internet do their best to get the packet where it’s supposed to go, China’s own surveillance computers are looking over the same information to see whether it should be stopped.

If one conducts passive surveillance with a tap, one cannot then go back and interfere with the packets. For filtering, such a setup is not needed. You just route the traffic though something that filters — basically all routers can filter. The filter looks at the packets and matches them to the rules. There are no “tiny mirror” or whatever. If you want to conduct passive surveillance you can use a tap and record the traffic for analysis. The two things are not really related. Moreover, internet surveillance is not something that only China does or that is easier for China to do — a quick look at the most sophisticated internet surveillance system in world can demonstrate that.

On to the mechanisms:

DNS tampering is explained well (although there may be some new variant). An important point is that most ISPs have their own DNS servers, managing a centralized system could be awkward (though not impossible), and users can use other uncensored DNS servers.

IP Blocking: This technique is incorrectly explained in the article.

While your signal is going out, and as the other system is sending a reply, the surveillance computers within China are looking over your request, which has been mirrored to them. They quickly check a list of forbidden IP sites. If you’re trying to reach one on that blacklist, the Chinese international-gateway servers will interrupt the transmission by sending an Internet “Reset” command both to your computer and to the one you’re trying to reach.

If packets are sent (trying to establich a tcp connection) for a particular IP and they pass through a router configured to block packets for that IP, the router will block those packets. Thats it. There is no connection ever made. If you sniff such a connection you will only see outgoing syn packets and nothing else. No reset packets are sent. There’s no “mirror” processing anything while you wait.

URL keyword block – This technique is actually the resest one described under IP blocking. If any part of the get request contains certain keywords — and domain names are often used as keywords — a reset packets will be sent to both the source and destination to terminate the connection. When is it triggered? This is confusing because the GFW’s keyword filtering is bi-directional but in my experience it is triggered on the way out of China. I say this because you can trigger it by requesting non-existent content. Depending on how long it takes to send the reset packet you may receive some of the content you requested which is what makes it appear that the filtering happens on the way in. After receiving reset packets the source and destination will not be able to connect to each other for a period of time.

Body Filtering – This is a bit of a tough one. Basically, if you create a web page with a keyword that normally triggers the reset packets if it appears in the url path, you can access it fine from China. I originally thought that this meant that body content was not filtered, but if you create a large page of such words the reset packets can be triggered. This may mean that a sampling of packet are checked, not all packets. In any case the behavior is the same as discussed above — the source and destination cannot connect to one another for a period of time. If you keep requesting the content you trigger more reset packets so t takes longer to be able to connect, but if you wait, and then trigger the reset packets again it won’t be longer the second or third time. There’s no escalating punishment.

Bi-directional keyword filtering

As Chinese-speaking people outside the country, perhaps academics or exiled dissidents, look for data on Chinese sites—say, public-health figures or news about a local protest—the GFW computers can monitor what they’re asking for and censor what they find.

Again, the keyword filtering is bi-directional, if you trigger it on connections to China the same behavior applies. Again, the issue of “monitoring” in this context implies that there’s something intelligent and deliberate about the filtering. If the packet matches the rules, it triggers the filtering mechanism, in this case reset packets.

Circumvention

Easy is a relative concept here. If a user chooses to break the law and acquires the necessary knowledge to by pass censorship then, yeah, it can be easy. You can buy vpn access — at least until lots of people start using and then it gets blocked – or use an encrypted proxy — at least until it gets blocked. They don’t need to block all VPNs, they can just block the IP addresses of those they want — those that become popular amongst citizens seeking to circumvent the GFW.

But despite the issues with the technical mechanisms the article is dead on with its conclusions:

What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother. Most Chinese people, like most Americans, are interested mainly in their own country. All around them is more information about China and things Chinese than they could possibly take in… When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside?

All the technology employed by the Golden Shield, all the marvelous mirrors that help build the Great Firewall—these and other modern achievements matter mainly for an old-fashioned and pre-technological reason. By making the search for external information a nuisance, they drive Chinese people back to an environment in which familiar tools of social control come into play.

Ding! We have a winner.

Battles are being fought all over the globe, while the development and use of technologies that protect privacy and make it possible to circumvent censorship are rapidly increasing. The same tools helping dissidents to evade censorship in repressive countries are also being used by citizens in democratic countries-to protect themselves from unwarranted Internet surveillance. Focusing on the global character of both the practice of Internet censorship and surveillance, as well as the resistance to it, provides for both a better understanding of this important trend as well as for the possibility of creating global alliances to combat its spread.

The full article is available below.

Evasion tactics: Global online censorship is growing, but so are the means to challenge it and protect privacy Index on Censorship, Volume 36, Issue 4 November 2007 , pages 71 – 85 (pdf)

The number of countries that censor and monitor their citizens’ use of the Internet is increasing. While it is no secret that China and Iran censor the Internet, at least 25 countries, including Pakistan, Ethiopia, Thailand and Uzbekistan, also have technical filtering regimes in place. Some of the technology is even exported by western companies: search engines, blog hosting providers and email providers have extended their existing filtering mechanisms-which usually target pornography and copyright infringement-to censor political content and gain access to lucrative markets in repressive countries.

Censorship and surveillance is not restricted to authoritarian regimes. The technology used to censor the Internet in entire countries in the Middle East and North Africa also filters access in schools and libraries in North America. An Internet service provider (ISP) in Canada blocked access to a website set up by members of its workers’ union during a labour dispute. ISPs in the United States have implemented a sophisticated, and illegal, monitoring and data-mining programme, covering both Internet and telephone communications, at the behest of the National Security Agency. The problem is magnified when the concept of censorship is extended beyond just the technical aspects of filtering web content and Internet services.

There is, however, a growing resistance to Internet censorship and surveillance, although it is often characterised as a struggle confined to dissidents in a few select authoritarian regimes. There are a wide variety of awareness raising campaigns as well as academic research projects aimed at exposing and confronting censorship. Legal battles are being fought all over the globe, while the development and use of technologies that protect privacy and make it possible to circumvent censorship are rapidly increasing. The same tools helping dissidents to evade censorship in repressive countries are also being used by citizens in democratic countries-to protect themselves from unwarranted Internet surveillance.

There are three key factors to Internet censorship. First, there are formal and informal mechanisms, including laws, licensing and self-regulation, that act to create the legal, and often extra-legal, framework within which Internet censorship takes place. Second, there are a variety of technical methods through which Internet filtering and blocking can be implemented to restrict access to content and services online. Third, Internet surveillance technologies are routinely deployed in order to monitor and track online communications. All countries use varying degrees of these to implement control, generating fear among Internet users and contributing to a climate of self-censorship that is creating alarming challenges to freedom of expression online.

The legal basis for technical filtering is murky and rarely explicit, and can vary significantly from country to country. It is often a combination of press law, telecommunications regulations and laws protecting state security. Regulation and oversight is most often conducted by the Telecommunication Ministry or by the often state-controlled telecommunications companies.

In South Korea, the Ministry of Information and Communication instructed Internet service providers to block access to content deemed to be ‘North Korean propaganda’ and thus illegal under the vague, and often abused, national security law. The Korean Internet Safety Commission (KISCOM) has also been set up to advise the government’s Internet censorship policies and its logo is prominently featured, along with the National Police Agency’s logo, on the ‘block page’ users see when they try to access censored websites. South Korea received a ‘high’ transparency rating from the OpenNet Initiative-a research project documenting Internet censorship. This was based on the country’s open acknowledgment of filtering, along with the presence of a ‘block page’ that informs users when attempts are made to access censored content.

In contrast, Uzbekistan received a ‘low’ transparency rating because the country’s filtering regime is based on a combination of self-censorship by ISPs and pressure from the country’s intelligence service-the National Security Service (SNB). In addition to occasionally ordering ISPs to block specific sites, the SNB monitoring also encourages them to self-censor or risk having their licences revoked. In a way, the practice is symbolic of the censorship regime as a whole. The ISPs attempt to conceal their filtering by redirecting users to innocuous sites when they try to access blocked content.

In some countries, there is no technical filtering in place; it is the legal system itself which acts as the primary mechanism of Internet censorship. Threatening ISPs, or content providers such as search engines, with ‘takedown’ requests is one of the most undocumented methods of censoring Internet content. In some cases these can be formal legal requests for removal due to copyright violation or claims of libel/defamation or informal requests due to allegations of supporting terrorism. ISPs are not required to report such ‘takedowns’ and most happen in complete silence. In these cases, ISPs act as judge, jury and enforcer at the same time and will act to remove content rather than fully investigate the claim, in order to avoid liability.

The questions surrounding the lack of transparency and accountability led Christian Ahlert, Chris Marsden and Chester Yung, from the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, to investigate what they termed the ‘privatisation of censorship’. In 2003, they conducted an experiment, known as ‘Liberty’, to test notice and takedown procedures in the US and Europe. They created a web page containing text that was clearly in the public domain and uploaded it to ISPs in the US and the UK. The uploaded text was an excerpt from Chapter 2 of J S Mill’s On Liberty, which discusses freedom of the press and censorship. They then created an email account with a free service for a mythical organisation called the ‘John Stuart Mill Heritage Foundation’ and sent takedown notices to the ISPs claiming copyright infringement. In the UK, ISPs took the information down, but in the US, they asked for more details, including a declaration ‘under penalty of perjury’ that the claim was valid. At this point, the researchers terminated the experiment. However, they noted that if they had supplied the language required by the ISPs, the takedown process could have continued.

In 2004, the group ‘Bits of Freedom’ conducted a similar experiment using Dutch ISPs. They uploaded text that was clearly in the public domain-the text even stated that it was in the public domain-and then sent takedown notices from free email accounts. Of the ten ISPs tested, only three did not remove the content. One provider even forwarded the account details of the customer to the complainant. ‘Bits of Freedom’ went further than the ‘Liberty’ experiment by filling out a form sent by the ISPs that asked for additional details including name and address and to ‘indemnify the provider from any liability for acting upon the request to take down’. This led ‘Bits of Freedom’ to conclude that the ‘penalty of perjury’ test which worked in the ‘Liberty’ experiment was clearly not enough of a check against abuse.

These studies exposed the flawed process through which takedown and notice are being implemented. It is clearly being exploited to silence online critics. The Church of Scientology has used takedown notices alleging copyright violations with great success, even forcing Google to remove links from its search engine to particular sites. In addition to copyright, threats of law suits for defamation and libel are increasingly being used to stifle criticism. Singapore and Malaysia have often been accused of using such tactics. The new targets for libel and defamation cases are bloggers. While many blogs are about personal interests and read more like a diary, the blogging platform is also being used by citizen journalists, who publish without the filters of the traditional media.

While there have been documented cases where bloggers have been prosecuted for libel or defamation, many never make it to court. In August 2007, the website of the Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan was shut down. Derakhshan’s blog has long been censored in Iran. Despite being filtered, it remained popular and Iranians used technology to bypass the filters and access the site. However, after criticising an Iranian intellectual, Mehdi Khalaji, for working for a conservative think-tank in Washington DC, Derakhshan, his web hosting company, Hosting Matters, and domain registrar, GoDaddy, were served with a takedown notice. The notice, alleging libel and defamation, led to the deletion of some of Derakhshan’s blog posts by his hosting company and ultimately to the termination of his blog’s hosting service. Exemplifying just how flawed the notice and takedown process is, the notice claimed that in addition to Derakhshan, both the domain registrar and the web hosting company were implicated in and/or liable for activities conducted on Derakhshan’s blog. The notice implied that each of the three named in the notice (the registrar, the hosting company and Derakhshan) ‘published’ defamatory information and were therefore liable for damages.

The chilling effect of notice and takedown is well illustrated in this case. Faced with legal threats, Derakshan’s web-hosting company ordered him to remove ‘all’ references to Mr Khalaji or they would remove his entire website, even though the company recognised that the claims fell into a ‘grey area’. After taking down the offending posts, but refusing to remove all references to Mr Khalaji, Hosting Matters asked Mr Derakhshan to remove additional posts about Mr Khalaji.

Please remove the latest post you have made referencing Mehdi Khalaji. This person continues to insist that everything and anything you post about him is defamatory. While we do not agree with the assessment as it relates to the latest post you have made, we do not have the time, interest, or resources to invest in continually dealing with his complaints and to review your site.

(Source: http://hodertemp.blogspot.com/2007/08
/accounts-and-billing-hosting-matters.html)

This exchange clearly shows why ISPs are not equipped or qualified to make judgments on content and will always default to the lowest common denominator, with serious repercussions for freedom of speech and expression.

Content removed for allegedly supporting terrorism is one of the least documented forms of takedown. With copyright and defamation there is at least some element of a legal procedure, however flawed, but when it comes to terrorism, individuals and groups simply contact ISPs and have content removed. The Internet Haganah, which calls for the removal of sites which allegedly support terrorism, had counted 600 successful takedowns by 2005. These include websites, groups hosted by Yahoo! and storefronts at Cafe Press. In 2005, the Toronto-based Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center had several sites removed by their ISPs, one of which only contained a flag that carried the inscription, ‘There is no other God but Allah’. There was no hateful text or material advocating suicide bombing. The issue, as noted in the press release, was that the flag appeared to be the same one used by Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a group that, at the time, was not on the US State Department’s or Canada’s list of terrorist organisations.

While content removal remains largely undocumented, it is possible to interrogate the technical infrastructure through which countries block access. There is a variety of methods through which content on the Internet can be blocked that falls into three general categories: domain name server (DNS) tampering, Internet protocol (IP) address blocking, uniform resource locator (URL) filtering and keyword filtering.

DNS is the system that translates a domain name into a numerical IP address. By tampering with their DNS server, ISPs can force domain names to resolve to invalid or ‘spoofed’ IP addresses. The South Korean ISP, Kornet, resolves censored domains to an IP address which displays a police block page, indicating to the user that illegal content is being accessed. One of India’s leading ISPs, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd, uses DNS tampering to block websites, forcing domains to resolve to the invalid address 1.2.3.4 India focuses its filtering on Hindu extremists and some American right-wing sites, as well as sites advocating a Dalit homeland. DNS tampering is easy to circumvent, as a user can simply configure their computer to use an alternate DNS server, but it is often used by ISPs to avoid problems with over-blocking.

Countries new to filtering will generally start with blocking by IP address, before moving on to more expensive URL filtering solutions. Most ISPs do not have the capacity to filter by URL and the ones that do would need to purchase a significant amount of equipment to implement URL filtering without a significant drop in performance. ISPs must often respond quickly and effectively to blocking orders from the government or national security and intelligence services. So they block material in the cheapest way, using technology already integrated into their normal network environment. Blocking by IP is effective (the target site is blocked) and no new equipment needs to be purchased. It can be implemented in an instant, as all the required technology and expertise is readily available. Many ISPs already block IP addresses to combat spam and viruses.

But blocking by IP address comes with a significant cost: over-blocking. Many unrelated websites may be hosted on a single IP address, so, when blocked, all other content hosted on the server will also be inaccessible. Pakistan is an interesting case, because it is one of the few countries in which the blocking lists have become public. Internet traffic routes through a gateway operated by the Pakistan Telecommunications Company Limited. Officially, Pakistan only blocks 17 sites, although the list contains dead sites and typographical errors. The OpenNet Initiative tested 11 of these designated sites. It found that, in total, nearly 3.5 million are actually blocked. This total does not, however, include the hundreds of thousands of individual blogs hosted on Google’s blogspot service. Pakistan has blocked access to the IP addresses of key hosting providers including GoDaddy and Yahoo! In the past, Pakistan has also blocked IP addresses associated with the mirroring company Akamai, causing hundreds of thousands of sites to become inaccessible.

This is the same technique that the Canadian ISP Telus used to block access to a union-affiliated site during a labour dispute. In the process, it blocked access to over 700 unrelated sites. This generated a considerable amount of criticism and clearly demonstrated the unintended consequences of filtering technologies.

Over-blocking tends to create a significant backlash, especially from non-activist Internet users. While people will often tolerate the blocking of extremist or offensive sites, when their own regular browsing and blogging is interrupted they quickly become aware of censorship’s impact and campaign against it. An excellent example has been the ‘Don’t Block the Blog’ campaign which was started after Pakistan blocked access to Blogspot; pkblogs.com now offers an alternate means of accessing Blogspot, bypassing Pakistan’s filtering. However, in response, the authorities will often seek to implement filtering techniques that better target the specific sites they want to block.

As the complexities of implementing an effective filtering system are recognised, countries are beginning to move towards the use of commercial filtering technology. In addition to the issue of over-blocking, filtering systems suffer from another inherent problem: under-blocking. Alongside the maintenance of blocking lists-which can be considerable for categories such as pornography-other forms of content need to be blocked in order to have a reasonably effective filtering system. This primarily involves finding and blocking sites that enable users to get around the filtering. Commercial technologies have enabled the expansion of Internet censorship, providing a fine-grain control over the filtering and monitoring process. They are equipped with easy-to-use graphical interfaces for management of the filtering system, as well as pre-configured blocking categories which include ‘anonymisers’-sites that allow one to bypass censorship.

There are a growing number of countries that use commercial filtering technology. However it is often difficult to determine the exact technology being used. To date, the OpenNet Initiative has identified the use of SmartFilter, produced by the US company Secure Computing, in Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Oman, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and possibly in Iran, while Websense and Fortinet are being used in Yemen and Burma respectively.

Commercial filtering technologies can be configured to block very specific content as well. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the websites of the Arab Human Rights Information Network and Humum are mostly accessible. Only specific pages about Saudi Arabia are blocked. They can also be used to avoid network degradation associated with other methods of filtering. Saudi Arabia claims that its system actually improves performance.

But commercial filtering technologies introduce additional concerns. The way in which these companies categorise websites affects access to the Internet more widely. SmartFilter, for example, is configured to block predefined categories of content: anonymisers, nudity, pornography, and sexual materials. Recently, the video-sharing website dailymotion.com was blocked in Tunisia. SmartFilter had temporarily categorised the site as pornography, and, since Tunisia blocks the pornography category, the website was blocked. Several days later, SmartFilter removed dailymotion.com from the pornography category and it became accessible.

In effect, governments are ceding the decision on what precisely to filter to unaccountable commercial entities. Due to the categorisation choices made by these companies, content may become inaccessible to entire populations, even if the government never intended to block the content. This situation is exacerbated by the intellectual property protections afforded to the companies. The block lists used by commercial filtering software are secret; decrypting and analysing them is considered to be illegal.

The chilling effect of legislation, such as the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), has resulted in researchers stopping work on the impact of commercial filtering software. This is especially relevant because the software is increasingly turning up in undemocratic countries and is being used to filter all sorts of content-including political speech.

The work of two high-profile researchers was cut short in this field due to mounting legal risks. Ben Edelman sought to obtain a court judgment in order to protect himself from liability for decrypting the blocking lists of commercial filtering technologies, but his case was dismissed. Seth Finkelstein was forced to abandon work decrypting the blocking lists of filtering software products because of the associated legal risks.

Despite the obstacles, there are growing efforts to resist and challenge the spread of Internet censorship. These range from research projects designed to document and expose current censorship practices, to legal challenges to the development and use of technologies. Combined, these efforts seek to challenge the norms surrounding the practice of filtering, change the policies of governments and ISPs and empower users to protect their privacy and exercise the right of free expression online.

There are numerous human rights organisations investigating and highlighting egregious cases of Internet censorship, including Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch. These groups collect and analyse reports of blocked content, as well as create campaigns to highlight egregious cases of censorship and make that information available to a wide audience. They also seek to influence public policy and engage in lobbying and advocacy, targeting governments and corporations. Amnesty International started the irrepressible.info campaign that seeks to highlight Internet censorship by allowing website owners to display fragments of text taken from censored sites around the world. More than 70,000 people have signed the pledge calling for an end to ‘unwarranted restriction of freedom of expression on the Internet’. The signatures from this pledge were delivered at the 2006 Internet Governance Forum before an audience of governments and companies involved in censoring the Internet.

Reporters Without Borders maintains a list of imprisoned cyberdissidents and has also created the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents which provides information on how to secure one’s communications and bypass Internet censorship. Human Rights Watch has released detailed reports that not only document the technical aspects of filtering, but also the cases of individuals who have been directly affected by state censorship. The reports contain detailed recommendations for governments, corporations and activists to promote policies that enhance freedom of expression online.

In addition to major international organisations, there are coalitions such as the Global Voices Advocacy project and the Society Against Internet Censorship in Pakistan that seek to build alliances among bloggers and free expression advocates worldwide. There are also numerous grass-roots campaigns to free imprisoned bloggers around the world. The groups not only raise awareness about violations of freedom of expression, but also provide information on how to bypass Internet censorship and on strategies to maintain anonymity online.

While advocacy is an extremely important component in challenging censorship, there also exists the need to technically uncover exactly the methods and targets of state censorship. Research projects have been pivotal in establishing a body of credible evidence, exposing practices that are most often secretive and forcing governments and corporations to account for their censorship practices. Faced with accurate, empirical evidence, it becomes increasingly difficult for states to continue denying the fact that they are censoring the Internet.

The chillingeffects.org project, a collaboration between leading law schools and universities across the US, tracks notice and takedown requests. The majority of complaints relate to copyright and trademark infringement, but increasingly also cover libel and defamation. The project has tracked over 2,000 such notices. It also provides ‘weather reports’, which are a great resource for investigating the use of the law to remove content.

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) has developed a set of tests that interrogate the Internet to identify filtered content. To date, ONI has tested in over 40 countries worldwide and has uncovered the techniques employed by states, usually at the ISP level, to filter the Internet. Moreover, ONI has begun to develop methods to monitor Internet access during key time periods, such as elections, in order to collect evidence of the temporary tampering with Internet access and in some cases denial of service to opposition websites. ONI has also identified technologies created by American companies, which are used to censor political speech in repressive countries. This work has informed a US Congressional committee that brought representatives from leading companies to explain their actions. ONI work has also been widely cited and used by human rights and press freedom groups around the world.

But while ONI has done excellent work in interrogating systems of Internet filtering, surveillance has proven to be much more elusive: it can be conducted in a passive manner and is thus extremely difficult, if not impossible, to document technically. Therefore, the majority of the work done in uncovering systems of surveillance has been through leaks, freedom of information requests and legal process.

The United States maintains the most sophisticated surveillance programme in the world. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) created the ‘Surveillance Society Clock’, modelled after the doomsday clock, to symbolise just how much of a threat the current levels of surveillance in the US are to a free society. The clock is currently at six minutes to midnight.

Surveillance practices in the US are being challenged in the courts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) have been extremely active in bringing legal challenges to uncover the vast surveillance programme. The EFF filed a lawsuit on behalf of AT&T customers to challenge the company’s participation in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) illegal domestic surveillance. The challenge was made after it was revealed that the NSA had been data-mining Internet and telephone logs from various telecommunications companies in the US without the proper legal authority. In response, the Bush administration is seeking to shield participating companies behind vaguely worded ‘state secrets’ protection. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Pentagon also maintain surveillance programmes. As a result of investigative reporting and the threat of legal challenges, two of these programmes have been suspended. The DHS suspended ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualisation, Insight and Semantic Enhancement) after it was found to violate privacy laws. The Pentagon suspended its TALON database-which monitored peace activists amongst others-and the infamous Total Information Awareness project after similar concerns were mounted.

Legal challenges against Internet censorship are also being mounted worldwide. In Iran, the conservative website Baztab was filtered after several articles critical of President Ahmadinejad were published, but access to the site was restored following a successful legal challenge. The unblocking of one website-run by well-connected people-is a small victory, but it could be very significant. If the procedures for blocking content become transparent, if there is an appeals process and some level of accountability, it then becomes increasingly difficult for governments to justify censorship. Human rights groups have long called for a legally transparent process through which censorship can be challenged.

China has also been the site of a legal challenge-once largely thought to be impossible. A Chinese blogger known as Yetaai [see pp161-164] brought a case against China Telecom for blocking his website. It is seen as a landmark case because it may force the company or the government to admit that Internet censorship actually takes place. Although many believe that Yetaai will not be successful, his case has inspired others to use the legal system to challenge Internet censorship in China. Another blogger, Liu Xiaoyuan, has attempted to sue the Chinese company Sohu for censoring several posts on his blog, while a website, www.bullog.cn, is calling for public hearings to protect it from being shut down.

In another case that is emblematic of the global resistance to censorship, the family of Wang Xiaoning, an activist who was arrested and tortured in China, is suing Yahoo! in an American court because Yahoo! provided information to the Chinese government that was used in the prosecution. Yahoo! has filed a motion to dismiss the case.

This is not the first case in which Yahoo! has provided evidence to the Chinese government resulting in the conviction of dissidents. Chinese journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to ten years in prison in China, after distributing the Chinese government’s instructions to domestic journalists on how to cover the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Shi Tao sent the information to a foreign-hosted dissident website from his Yahoo! email account. The Chinese government asked Yahoo! to provide information on the account details and this information was used in the case against Shi Tao.

The case illustrates that while many people assume that there is anonymity online, users have to protect themselves to keep their identity hidden. Technologies that make it possible to circumvent censorship and enhance the individual’s right to communicate and access information are also an important means for challenging censorship and surveillance. Filtering and monitoring communications online make it possible for hostile actors to find identifying information that may be used to arrest and imprison political dissidents.

In order to combat these growing threats, technologies are being developed to evade censorship and protect privacy. These same technologies are used by dissidents in politically repressive countries as well as activists in democratic countries. Peacefire, for example, is an organisation that develops and provides technology to evade censorship. It was formed to advocate on behalf of children who were being subjected to filtering in schools and libraries throughout the US. Peacefire now also focuses on providing these same censorship circumvention methods to users in China and Iran.

The technology allows a user in a censored location to connect to an unblocked, intermediary computer, in an uncensored location, to access content through the computer’s Internet connection. The user in the censored country does not directly access a blocked website, but asks the intermediary computer to do so. The intermediary computer retrieves the requested website and displays it back to the user.

While there are a variety of technologies available that can be used to circumvent censorship, there is a fundamental challenge: how to disclose the location of the uncensored intermediary to users who want to bypass censorship, while keeping it secret from agents who seek to find and censor these intermediaries. There are two main approaches to this problem: public and private. The public approach is to create numerous intermediary locations, through which users can bypass censorship and simply reveal more, through email lists, instant messaging and so on, as each becomes blocked. Censors who are slow to act will find more and more people using these circumvention systems. However, since many countries now use commercial filtering applications, the list of ‘proxy and anonymiser’ sites that these companies maintain are updated frequently, resulting in a situation where the lifetime of a new circumvention intermediary can last between one day and one week before being blocked.

Private circumvention solutions focus on distributing the location of the intermediary computer to people who know and trust one another. By leveraging these relationships of trust, a circumvention provider can slowly develop a network and provide stable circumvention services to a few-with a greatly reduced risk of being blocked by censors. Psiphon is a personal circumvention system that was designed and developed by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. It allows users in uncensored locations to turn their own home computer into a circumvention server and allow their friends and family members in censored locations to surf freely. One of the goals of the project was to make the software extremely simple, so that those with limited technical abilities could make use of the technology.

There is an important distinction to be made between circumvention and anonymity technologies. Circumvention technologies focus, with varying degrees of security, on allowing users to bypass censorship, while anonymity technologies focus on protecting the users’ identity from outside observers, such as government surveillance, as well as from the anonymity system itself. Circumvention systems that use encryption can protect users in some surveillance scenarios, but are not anonymous because owners of the circumvention system can see everything that the user does. They also cannot protect users from traffic analysis attacks in the same way that anonymity systems can. Anonymity systems protect privacy by shielding the identity of the requesting user from the content provider. In addition, they employ routing techniques to ensure that the user’s identity is shielded from the anonymous communications system itself. In addition to providing anonymity, these technologies are also used in many countries to bypass Internet censorship. Anonymity systems are increasingly being recommended by privacy advocates. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada, for example, recommends that Internet users protect themselves online by using anonymity technologies, as well as anonymous remailers.

The most widely known anonymity system is Tor (see p143). It is promoted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as software to protect privacy and civil liberties online and is used by bloggers who want anonymity, as well as by government embassies around the world. Tor works by routing a user’s request through at least three Tor servers. As the request hops from one Tor server to another, a layer of encryption is removed, so no individual server knows both the original source and destination of the request. The last server in the chain of hops, known as a circuit, actually connects to the requested content and then sends that information back through the circuit to the user. However, anonymity technologies are currently not difficult to block. Tor’s developers are working on building in blocking resistance to the anonymity system.

The Internet is a tool, like any other, that can be both used and abused. We know that governments around the world, much like companies, schools, libraries, and parents, restrict access to Internet content they do not want their citizens, employees, students, patrons and children to see. However, there is a failure to recognise Internet censorship and surveillance as a growing global concern. There is a tendency instead to criticise the most infamous offenders-notably China and Iran-and to overlook repressive practices elsewhere. Focusing on the global character of both the practice of Internet censorship and surveillance, as well as the resistance to it, provides for both a better understanding of this important trend as well as for the possibility of creating global alliances to combat its spread.

“We can’t decipher it. That’s why we’re talking about source telecommunication surveillance — that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it’s been decrypted.”…

Ziercke said there was a vital need for German law enforcement agencies to have the ability to conduct on-line searches of computer hard drives of suspected terrorists using “Trojan horse” spyware.

Trojaning the computer, however, does allow for much more surveillance than just Skype communications. In many respects these are not technology issues but policy issues. See, for example, the privacy issues with the US carnivore/dcs1000 and the increased concern now that they’ve switched to private, commercial applications.

This also raises some interesting questions with regard to Skype and China. While the text message is filtered — although I could only find one censored word, fuck, when I checked it out — I’m not convinced this supports the allegations of surveillance.

Note that while it’s a common recommendation to use technical means to protect one’s privacy (such as the “Tor” anonymity system, at torproject.org), such measures are frequently not workable for any but the most knowledgeable and dedicated people. They are often inconvenient and shift a burden on to citizens to be constantly on guard, as opposed to not requiring such guarding in the first place. Using privacy/anonymity programs is good advice, but in overall terms, a bad solution.

I think the point is well taken. Not only should we be making these technologies easier to use (and I think the Tor folks doing so) but we should also recognize that the problem is embedded in a host of other issues. Technology may help us in the short run, but it does not solve the problem. (Oh, and I too like the phrase Seth coined “The price of total personalisation is total surveillance.”).

Catspaw also picks up on a similar theme in response to esquire’s nomination of psiphon as one of the six ideas that will change the world.
She writes:

I’m glad that the issues around internet censorship are getting mainstream attention, as every additional mention helps, but I worry when software programs like Psiphon are advertised as a magic bullet that’s going to make the problem go away. It won’t. This is a complicated issue with very deep social, political and legal structures supporting the censorship, and no piece of software is going to be able to counter that; it’s not just a technical issue.

One software program called Psiphon, which was developed by researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, allows any person with a computer to serve as a proxy for someone living behind a firewall. Since it was launched a year ago, more than 100,000 people have turned their personal computers into proxies.

The most sophisticated proxy technology may be Tor, developed jointly by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet freedom advocacy organization. Tor is a downloadable software that routes an Internet surfing session through three proxy servers randomly chosen from a network of more than 1,000 servers run by volunteers worldwide. “Tor is state of the art,” says John Mitchell, an expert on Internet security at Stanford University. For citizens of repressive regimes, it may be the best hope or evading the cat’s paw.

This partial picture ignores the global use of these technologies. More and more countries are censoring the Internet — not just China and Iran.

Here’s an interesting anecdote. When psiphon was released the CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster, covered it but the reporter working on the story had to phone me at the Citizen Lab because she could not access the psiphon website from CBC because it was blocked by their filtering software, aka censorware. This is not the first time I’ve heard this. Reporters at CBC need to use tools like psiphon to do their jobs!

The other missing piece is surveillance. The U.S., which has the most sophisticated electronic surveillance program in the world, has been caught illegally spying on citizens. Anti-Censorship/privacy enhancing technologies are used all over the world. Even the Privacy Commissioner of Canada recommends that Canadians use anonymous communications technologies. These are tools developed for and used by people all over the world. To pitch them as something that’s only used in repressive countries is misleading and inaccurate.