Web censorship: the net is closing in
April 24, 2013 http://www.pakalertpress.com/2013/04/24/web-censorship-the-net-is-closing-in/
Across the globe governments are monitoring
and censoring access to the web. And if we’re not careful millions more
people could find the internet fractured, fragmented and controlled by
the state
Every state in the world has its own
laws, cultural norms and accepted behaviours. As billions of people come
online in the next decade, many will discover a newfound independence that will test these boundaries. Each state will attempt to regulate the internet, and shape it in its own image.
The majority of the world’s internet users encounter some form of censorship
– also known by the euphemism “filtering” – but what that actually
looks like depends on a country’s policies and its technological
infrastructure. Not all or even most of that filtering is political
censorship; progressive countries routinely block a modest number of sites, such as those featuring child pornography.
In some countries, there are several entry points for internet connectivity, and a handful of private telecommunications companies control them (with some regulation). In others, there is only one entry point, a nationalised internet service
provider (ISP), through which all traffic flows. Filtering is
relatively easy in the latter case, and more difficult in the former.
When technologists began to notice
states regulating and projecting influence online, some warned against a
“Balkanisation of the internet”, whereby national filtering and other
restrictions would transform what was once the global internet into a
connected series of nation-state networks. The web would fracture and
fragment, and soon there would be a “Russian internet” and an “American
internet” and so on, all coexisting and sometimes overlapping but, in
important ways, separate. Information would largely flow within
countries but not across them, due to filtering, language or even just
user preference. The process would at first be barely perceptible to
users, but it would fossilise over time and ultimately remake the
internet.
It’s very likely that some version of the above scenario will occur, but the degree
to which it does will greatly be determined by what happens in the next
decade with newly connected states – which path they choose, whom they
emulate and work together with.
The first stage of the process,
aggressive and distinctive filtering, is under way. China is the world’s
most active and enthusiastic filterer of information. Entire platforms
that are hugely popular elsewhere in the world – Facebook, Tumblr,
Twitter – are blocked by the Chinese government.
On the Chinese internet, you would be
unable to find information about politically sensitive topics such as
the Tiananmen Square protests, embarrassing information about the
Chinese political leadership, the Tibetan rights movement and the Dalai
Lama, or content related to human rights, political reform or
sovereignty issues.
To the average Chinese user, this
censorship is seamless – without prior knowledge of events or ideas, it
would appear that they never existed.
China’s leadership doesn’t hesitate to
defend its policies. In a white paper released in 2010, the government
calls the internet “a crystallisation of human wisdom” but states that
China’s “laws and regulations clearly prohibit the spread of information
that contains contents subverting state power, undermining national
unity [or] infringing upon national honour and interests.”
The next stage for many states will be
collective editing, states forming communities of interest to edit the
web together, based on shared values or geopolitics. For larger states,
collaborations will legitimise their filtering efforts and deflect some
unwanted attention (the “look, others are doing it too” excuse). For
smaller states, alliances along these lines will be a low-cost way to
curry favour with bigger players and gain technical skills that they
might lack at home.
Collective editing may start with basic
cultural agreements and shared antipathies among states, such as what
religious minorities they dislike, how they view other parts of the
world or what their cultural perspective is on historical figures such
as Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong or Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Larger states are less likely to band
together than smaller ones – they already have the technical
capabilities – so it will be a fleet of smaller states, pooling
their resources, that will find this method useful. If some member
countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), an
association of former Soviet states, became fed up with Moscow’s
insistence on standardising the Russian language across the region, they
could join together to censor all Russian-language content from their
national internets and thus limit their citizens’ exposure to Russia.
Ideology and religious morals are likely
to be the strongest drivers of these collaborations. Imagine if a group
of deeply conservative Sunni-majority countries – say, Saudi Arabia,
Yemen, Algeria and Mauritania – formed an online alliance and decided to
build a “Sunni web”. While technically this Sunni web would still be
part of the larger internet, it would become the main
source of information, news, history and activity for citizens living
in these countries. For years, the development and spread of the
internet was highly determined by its English-only language standard,
but the continued implementation of internationalised domain names (IDN), which allow people to use and access domain names
written in non-Roman alphabet characters, is changing this. The
creation of a Sunni web – indeed, all nationalised internets – becomes
more likely if its users can access a version of the internet in their
own language and script.
Within the Sunni web, the internet could
be sharia-complicit: e-commerce and e-banking would look different,
since no one would be allowed to charge interest; religious police might
monitor online speech, working together with domestic law enforcement
to report violations; websites with gay or lesbian content would be
uniformly blocked; women’s movements online might somehow be curtailed;
and ethnic and religious minority groups might find themselves closely
monitored, restricted or even excluded. In this scenario, how possible
it would be for a local tech-savvy citizen to circumvent this internet
and reach the global world wide web depends on which country he lived
in: Mauritania might not have the desire or capacity to stop him, but
Saudi Arabia probably would. If the Mauritanian government became
concerned that its users were bypassing the Sunni web, on the other
hand, surely one of its new digital partners could help it build higher
fences.
There will be some instances where
autocratic and democratic nations edit the web together. Such a
collaboration will typically happen when a weaker democracy
is in a neighbourhood of stronger autocratic states that coerce it to
make the same geopolitical compromises online that it makes in the
physical world.
For example, Mongolia is a young democracy
with an open internet, sandwiched between Russia and China – two large
countries with their own unique and restrictive internet policies. The
former Mongolian prime minister Sukhbaatar Batbold explained to us that
he wants Mongolia, like any country, to have its own identity. This
means, he said, it must have good relations with its neighbours to keep
them from meddling in Mongolian affairs.
People use the internet in Tehran, Iran, where the government has
spoken of creating its own ‘halal internet’. Photograph: Vahid Salemi/AP
A neutral stance of noninterference is
more easily sustainable in the physical world. Virtual space
significantly complicates this model. People sympathetic to opposition
groups and ethnic minorities within China and Russia would look at
Mongolia as an excellent place to congregate. Supporters of the Uighurs,
Tibetans or Chechen rebels might seek to use Mongolia’s internet space
as a base from which to mobilise, to wage online campaigns and build
virtual movements. If that happened, the Mongolian government would no
doubt feel the pressure from China and Russia, not just diplomatically
but because its national infrastructure is not built to withstand a
cyber assault from either neighbour. Seeking to please its neighbours
and preserve its own physical and virtual sovereignty, Mongolia might
find it necessary to abide by a Chinese or Russian mandate and filter
internet content associated with hot-button issues.
What started as the world wide web will
begin to look more like the world itself, full of internal divisions and
divergent interests. Some form of visa requirement will emerge on the
internet. This could be done quickly and electronically, as a method to
contain the flow of information in both directions, requiring that users
register and agree to certain conditions to access a country’s
internet. Citizen engagement, international business operations and
investigative reporting will all be seriously affected. This, along with
internal restrictions of the internet, suggests a 21st-century
equivalent of Japan’s famous sakoku (“locked country”) policy of near-total isolation enacted in the 17th century.
Some states may implement visa
requirements as both a monitoring tool for international visitors and as
a revenue-generating exercise – a small fee would be charged upon
entering a country’s virtual space, even more if one’s online activities
violated the terms of the visa. Virtual visas would appear in response
to security threats related to cyber attacks; if your IP address (the
unique number associated with each device on the internet) came from a
blacklisted country, you would encounter heightened monitoring.
Under conditions like these, the world
will see its first Internet asylum seeker. A dissident who can’t live
freely under an autocratic Internet and is refused access to other
states’ Internets will choose to seek physical asylum in another country
to gain virtual freedom on its Internet. There could be a form of
interim virtual asylum, where the host country would share sophisticated
proxy and circumvention tools that would allow the dissident to connect
outside.
Virtual asylum will not work, however,
if the ultimate escalation occurs: the creation of an alternative domain
name system (DNS), or even aggressive and ubiquitous tampering with it
to advance state interests. Today, the internet as we know it uses the
DNS to match computers and devices to relevant data sources, translating
IP addresses (numbers) into readable names, with .edu, .com, .net
suffixes, and vice versa. No government has yet achieved an alternative
system, but if one succeeded in doing so, it would effectively unplug
its population from the global internet and instead offer only a closed,
national intranet. In technical terms, this would entail creating a
censored gateway between a given country and the rest of the world, so
that a human proxy could facilitate external data transmissions when
absolutely necessary – for matters involving state resources, for
instance.
It’s the most extreme version of what
technologists call a walled garden. On the internet, a walled garden
refers to a browsing environment that controls a user’s access to
information and services online. (This concept is not limited to
discussions of censorship; AOL and CompuServe, internet giants for a
time, both started as walled gardens.) For the full effect of
disconnection, the government would also instruct the routers to fail to
advertise the IP addresses of websites – unlike DNS names, IP addresses
are immutably tied to the sites themselves – which would have the
effect of putting those websites on a very distant island, utterly
unreachable. Whatever content existed on this national network would
circulate only internally, trapped like a cluster of bubbles in a
computer screen saver, and any attempts to reach users on this network
from the outside would meet a hard stop. With the flip of a switch, an
entire country would simply disappear from the internet.
This is not as crazy as it sounds. It
was first reported in 2011 that the Iranian government’s plan to build a
“halal internet” was under way, and the regime’s December 2012 launch
of Mehr, its own version of YouTube with “government-approved videos“,
demonstrated that it was serious about the project. Details of the plan
remained hazy but, according to Iranian government officials, in the
first phase the national “clean” internet would exist in tandem with the
global internet for Iranians (heavily censored as it is), then it would
come to replace the global internet altogether. The government and
affiliated institutions would provide the content for the national
intranet, either gathering it from the global web and scrubbing it, or
creating it manually. All activity on the network would be closely
monitored. Iran’s head of economic affairs told the country’s state-run
news agency that they hoped their halal internet would come to replace
the web in other Muslim countries, too – at least those with Farsi
speakers. Pakistan has pledged to build something similar.
It is possible that Iran’s threat is
merely a hoax. How exactly the state intends to proceed with this
project is unclear both technically and politically. How would it avoid
enraging the sizable chunk of its population that has access to the
internet? Some believe it would be impossible to fully disconnect Iran
from the global internet because of its broad economic reliance on
external connections. Others speculate that, if it wasn’t able to build
an alternative root system, Iran could pioneer a dual-internet model
that other repressive states would want to follow. Whichever route Iran
chooses, if it is successful in this endeavour, its halal internet would
surpass the “great firewall of China” as the single most extreme
version of information censorship in history. It would change the
internet as we know it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
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