I think therefore I am

Freedom of speech is one of the fundamental rights of free expression and is enshrined in numerous human rights organisations. It allows people to voice an opinion, especially on political, religious and social matters, without fear of retribution. Proponents maintain it is the key for the discovery of truth and the promotion of tolerance, and an essential element of democratic governments.

The internet holds vast potential as a resource for both freedom of the press and freedom of expression. The ease and speed of internet communication provides a crucial platform for dialogue across borders, and allows for innovative approaches in sharing and acquiring knowledge. Although freedom of expression forms part of our basic human rights there is an imminent threat to undercut it through rigorous attempts to regulate and censor internet access and content. Institutions and companies such as Human Rights Watch, UNESCO, Yahoo! and Google with a mandate to defend press freedoms have been actively engaged in efforts to improve the situation globally.

However, internet censorship is widespread and is getting tougher. Following last year’s altercations with various governments over censorship, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt warned that the internet is becoming a more suppressed medium.

Speaking at the opening of the Summit Against Violent Extremism in Dublin, Schmidt raised an alarm when he predicted that governments in the Middle East, in the throes of rebellion, will most certainly come down harder on internet users, website administrators and ISPs. More disturbing was the caution that monitoring content does not only affect dictatorial and rigid states such as Iran, China and North Korea. According to Schmidt there has been an evident surge of internet filtering in democratic nations all around Europe which has now spread to the US and beyond.

The summit, which was organised by Google’s new think tank Google Ideas and the Council on Foreign Relations, gave Schmidt the space to unreservedly clarify the emergence of a new form of censorship. He cautioned that several governments want to ensure the net becomes a more controlled and regulated medium, saying: “Technology has become more pervasive and as the citizenry becomes completely wired, and the content gets localised to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television.”

Schmidt believes that rulers are preventing citizens from gaining access to essential information by effectively turning the internet into a new medium for a state-owned voice. “In most of these countries television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket,” he said.

National gagging orders
Access to the internet allows for an unprecedented empowerment of the individual. Social unrest and upheaval against authoritarian regimes cascaded across North Africa and the Middle East in the early part of the year when the stories of success in countries like Tunisia and Egypt spread over social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and through other forms of mobile communication. It might not have been Mark Zuckerberg that ousted Hosni Mubarak, but dedicated and persistent Egyptians that took to the streets of Cairo. Social media was merely a tool which served as a fundamental infrastructure for activists who may otherwise have struggled to organise protests and demonstrations.

It is the global character of the web that has made several dictatorial governments fret about giving users unrestricted access and granting them their human right of freedom of expression. According to human rights campaigners there are some nations particularly well versed and practiced in monitoring and censorship.

China
The biggest threat of censorship to Google comes from China, says Schmidt. Only a few months ago hackers » attempted to steal hundreds of Gmail account passwords belonging to Chinese human rights advocates, journalists and numerous US government officials. The trace led all the way to China but its government denied it. Google’s friction with the Chinese government resurfaced after the tech giant stopped a further attempt in July which also appeared to have originated from China. The Chinese Foreign Ministry officials claimed ignorance.

China’s government, anxious that the wave of revolutionary uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa could inspire domestic dissidents to organise their own protests, began a ruthless crackdown on anti-government advocates in spring.
The country has the globe’s fastest growing online market but is in “cyber turmoil” as companies battle to merge China’s strict policies with their aspiration to be fruitful in their economic endeavours. As the net provides access to boundless information, and gives individuals around the world the opportunity to make their opinions public, it is a particularly troublesome medium for China, which is looking to control public expression.

The government tried a different strategy when it ordered that all new computers must come loaded with “Green Dam-Youth Escort” software, which blocks a PC’s access to banned websites. The software also allows things commonly associated with spyware, like logging keystrokes, taking screen shots and sending information from users’ computers to third parties.

Arvind Ganesan, business and human rights director at Human Rights Watch, told The New Economy: “It is perfectly acceptable for a guardian to put such software on a computer to protect their child. However, if the government mandates it for a specific reason it becomes altogether something else. It is blatantly censorship.”

After several attempts to install the software, the Chinese government failed to achieve its objective. “The software worked with Windows but was heavily flawed as it was not compatible with Apple and Microsoft Office. Green Dam would search for objectionable words on the computer and suddenly shut down Word Pad. There was also the issue of intrusiveness, which people refused to accept as it had a backdoor, and meant the government could access all computersat will. Nobody was going to accept that,” Ganesan notes.

Middle East and North Africa
Of any country the Iranian state is alleged to use the most all-embracing filtering and surveillance system. Iran increased its internet scrutiny and crackdown during the presidential election in the summer of 2010 and has since been blocking any online material criticising the government. There is continuous filtering of political blogs and sites discussing women’s rights. The authorities have now ordered that anyone who has a blog is required to register it at the Ministry of Art and Culture. Bloggers who challenge the regime or fail to register face harassment and arrests, according to human rights groups.

Saudi Arabia brought in a new internet regulation scheme at the start of the year which is loosely based on Sharia law, and changes from one day to the next, according to Christoph Wilkes from Human Rights Watch.

Wilkes, an expert on internet censorship in Saudi Arabia, has witnessed the country’s development over the past few years and condemns its draconian laws. “Saudi Arabia brought in so-called anti-cybercrime laws that allegedly tackle online criminal activity. The regulations include several passages that make people believe they are protecting consumers but what they actually do is limit freedom of expression through obvious censorship,” says Wilkes. 

The new Saudi regulations complemented the already existing ones as they added certain elements. The human rights activist says protection of privacy is extremely limited, “especially when the government wants to go after people they do not like. It is totally acceptable to be hacking into computers and reading personal emails.”
As part of the new rule blogs now have to register and require a license before they can be created. A concerned Wilkes pointed out that there continue to be severe content restrictions and strict penalties.

Tunisian ISPs have to regularly report IP addresses and personal details of bloggers to officials for the purpose of identifying and putting those who speak up against the government under constant watch.

In Syria, in addition to the usual methods of internet filtering, any blogger who shows the slightest anti-government sentiment or expresses views that could “jeopardise national unity,” are detained. Cyber cafes are forced to take customer IDs, record the time of use and report the details to the government.

North Korea
An estimated five percent of the total North Korean population has internet access. All websites are government controlled and the authorities have to approve any content before it is uploaded. Blogging is strictly forbidden.

A European firewall
Concern about sovereign censorship does not stop with authoritative government regimes. European broadband providers, users and civil liberties groups all voiced alarm when it emerged recently that censorship could be affecting the Schengen jurisdiction, the common passport area within the EU.

Dialogue on the topic began at a secret gathering of the Council of the EU’s Law Enforcement Work Party (LEWP). LEWP, the EU’s central legislative and decision-making body usually in charge of issues concerning customs, fraud and counter terrorism, discussed the implementation of a “Great Firewall of Europe.”

“The presidency of the LEWP presented its intention to propose concrete measures towards creating a single secure European cyberspace,” according to brief minutes of the gathering.

The censorship proposal, which some say is comparable to the fierce methods employed by the Chinese establishment, is an attempt to repress and block what they refer to as “illicit” sites. With the recommended plan the council hopes to create a “virtual Schengen border” in which ISPs are obliged to block content from outside the jurisdiction if the council deems it to be “illicit.”

“There would also be “virtual access points” whereby “the Internet Service Providers would block illicit contents on the basis of the EU blacklist,” according to the minutes. The scheme does not give detail on what will constitute illicit content, and merely mentions an EU blacklist without further clarification.

Anti-censorship campaigners fear that innocent websites are routinely included on such lists as censorship expands and deviates from its original goals. Australia’s IT minister Stephen Conroy recently openly admitted to the public that detrimental mission creep is a problem internet censorship faces.

Domino effect
Even if the EU does have the people’s best interest at heart and is working with the sole purpose of attempting to eliminate online criminal activity the drawbacks of such actions will far outweigh its benefits, many anti-censorship activists claim.
More worryingly, there seems to be a significant movement within Western Europe and the US to encourage filtering content, according to experts.

“It is important for people to realise that censorship is a phenomenon not only affecting the Chinese and Syrian public. It is occurring in many parts of the world, and regardless of location, all internet control is equally problematic,” Ganesan believes.

The mountainous imperative to sieve harmful content for a variety of legal reasons is done through projected laws that ensure sovereign goals of surveillance are achieved. “If you look at regulation imposed and applied to the net it tends to be the type that tries to restrict people from putting things up that disturb the social order. This can be observed especially with rules introduced to protect internet IP rights in countries like France, for example.

There are also voluntary agreements like those seen in the Netherlands, which assist in the filtering of topics like child pornography. Other similar actions are undertaken in other European countries including Germany, according to Ganesan.
Regardless of the urgency and requirements to protect innocent citizens from illegal internet activity and exposure, or to assist artists in combating IP theft, Ganesan believes that censorship can never be fully justified in a fully democratic environment.
“Nobody will deny that these are grave problems in great need of being addressed and tackled. Our standpoint, however, is that it is the aggressive prosecution of offenders and not internet filtering that will help in solving these ongoing issues. No matter how thoroughly you filter there will always be websites that post copyrighted material,” Ganesan says.

Similarly, filtering and censorship issues are observed even in the US, and there is a creeping pressure from corporations to quickly deal with movie and music IP violation by any means possible.

Often this will be dealt with through what many consider to be drastic measures to prevent IP theft from happening as swiftly as possible.

As American state law dictates, consideration of internet activity lies just as much with the local authority as with Washington. That allowed Tennessee’s governor William Haslam to sign a new law at the end of June that makes it a crime to post an image if it is deemed to “frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress” to someone interested in the outside world who happens to be one of his constituents. It appears the Tennessee legislature has been updating its laws relating to internet usage and has decided to impose a $2,500 fine or up to a year of imprisonment to anybody in violation of the new law. It is as yet unclear however what constitutes a distressing, frightening and intimidating image as there is no further definition to elaborate the new decree.

“The method of filtering internet material is violating our freedom of expression and can only be described as censorship, whether they like it or not. If they use this means to protect IP it will introduce and nurture a censorship regime, which even if narrow, will trigger a domino effect,” Ganesan notes.

“I believe that the smallest attempt to filter the internet, regardless of the reasoning behind it, will be used as a rationalisation by every oppressive measure and any autocratic government all around the world. Even the dialogue of the council proposing this project legitimises this intensely illegitimate plan,” Ganesan says.

Combating censorship
There are many existing measures that autocratic governments employ to restrict the public from accessing pages they deem threatening to their own ideologies. Some of those methods are financial, such as the introduction of soaring taxes or excessively high tariffs which turn the internet into an unaffordable and extortionate expense for certain families. Authorities also utilise what many consider to be of the Orwellian school of thought. This is often undertaken with technical limitations that block software on servers and ruthlessly filter ever page available on the internet. Administrative and bureaucratic processes, such as forcing potential users to obtain permission from the government to register websites, are also popular and usually lead to states prohibiting the installation of international servers.

There are various techniques to combat censorship. One method that proved successful during the Middle East uprising was the use of unfiltered networks through satellites that helped get around restrictions.

The ‘Sneaker-net’, a technique used to smuggle in messages, videos, and postings past a country’s borders with the help of satellite phones and flash drives, was also a useful and popular instrument for those wishing to operate under a governement’s line of sight.

Some believe in fighting technology with technology, where users can resort to Tor, proxy servers, virtual private networks, and other tools to evade censorship and governmental surveillance is the way forward. Some of these have become the leading methods to fend off restrictions. Yet, they can be difficult to implement because censors are extremely quick to block them.

Planet telex
An unusual new data smuggling software that goes by the name of Telex emerged toward the end of July this year, and has since gained a lot of popularity. The programme was developed by American computer scientists in the hope it might work to abolish the issues that have stopped other anti-censorship technologies in the past.

Typically, anti-censorship systems work by creating a so-called “tunnel” through which an encrypted connection is established from the user’s computer to a friendly and reliable proxy server situated outside the censor’s network. The proxy server transmits requests to censored websites with the reply coming back to the user over the encrypted tunnel. Although this method is effective to a certain degree it often leads to a contrived action involving constant pursuit, near exposures, and repeated escapes as the censors erratically attempt to discover and block proxy servers. The challenge for users to find out the proxy servers’ login data and address is almost as tough as bypassing the censors while attempting to transmit that information to other users all over the world.

The Telex function is different as it creates a proxy server without the need for an IP address and allows the user to connect without a password.

Once the Telex application is installed, visiting a black-listed website becomes somewhat easier through the formation of an encrypted HTTPS link to a non-blacklisted web server outside of the censor’s network. This could be a standard website that the user habitually visits, one which the censor has no issues with in general. As the connection does not appear to be a threat, the censor allows it. Yet, the connection is merely a decoy, allowing the user to surreptitiously identify it as a Telex request. This is done by introducing into the headers cryptographic tags, a secret key constructed with the help of Steganography, a mechanism that protects hidden messages.

The benefit of the Telex service is that although anybody can mark their access with the use of publicly available data, only Telex with its hidden, private key can spot that this person’s connection has been registered. The path that is taken over the internet on the way to the websites that are not blacklisted often includes routers at various ISPs at the core of the network in use. ISPs arrange equipment within Telex stations, devices that hold private keys that allow them to recognise tagged connections from Telex clients and decrypt these HTTPS links. The stations then reroute the connections to anti-censorship services, such as proxy servers or Tor entry points, which consumers can utilise to access blocked websites. This is the final step in the process which creates an encrypted tunnel and redirects to any site without detection.

As much as the internet allows for freedom of speech and the movement of goods among many nations, by that nature it also acts as a forum in which governmentss can enforce  ideologies and standards through reconnaissance. For now, the balance is in their hands.