CHAPTER III Analysis and Findings

Over the first decade of the 21st century, the Internet and its convergence with mobile communications has enabled greater access to information and communication resources. In the last 10 years the Internet grew very, very fast. It is a bunch of thousands of little networks put together. Billion computers are connected and it is basically not controlled or even owned by a government or company. Everybody can put his web pages online which can be accessed by everybody on the world who is sitting in front of a computer with Internet access. This can and will change the world as we know it today. In 2010, nearly 2 billion people worldwide, over one quarter of the worlds population use the Internet. During the same period, defenders of digital rights have raised growing concerns over how legal and regulatory trends might be constraining online freedom of expression. The continuing reinvention and worldwide diffusion of the Internet has made it an increasingly central medium of expression of the 21st century, challenging the role of more traditional mass media including radio, television, and newspapers.

Figure 1 Number of Users and Proportion of Users by World Population Africa has the lowest level of Internet penetration at about 11 per cent, followed by Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, Oceania and Australia, and finally

North America, which has the highest proportion of its population online at over three-quarters (77 per cent) of the population.

Figure 2 Number of Users and Proportion of Users by World

The impact of these regional changes in Internet adoption is best summarized by the figure below, which shows North America declining from the largest plurality of the Internet population to a number below Europe and Asia. Europe is now also declining in its throw weight online, relative to Asia. These figures dramatically illustrate a global shift in the centre of the Internets gravity. Asia is replacing North America and Europe as the dominant presence on the Internet, constituting an increasingly large proportion of the world Internet population, and the implications of this development for freedom of expression online have yet to become clear.

Figure 3 Percentage of World Wide Internet

The growth in Internet penetration appears gradual on a global scale, compared for example with that of mobile telephony, content continues to expand at a fast pace. The number of active websites increased significantly after 2006 and appears to be growing steadily, creating a virtuous cycle of more content generating more use and more use generating more content.

Figure 4 Percentage of worldwide Internet Usage by number of active website websites worldwide.

This could have major societal implications, as the use of the Internet has the potential to reshape global access to information, communication, services, and technologies. Enduring issues, ranging from freedom of the press to the balance of world information flows in all sectors, and from the media to the sciences, will be tied to the Internet as a network of networks an interface between individuals and the news, information, stories, research, cultures and entertainment following worldwide. By 2010, mobile communication reached nearly 80 per cent of the worlds population, and is converging rapidly with Internet communication.

The internet is a good place to learn. The Internet gives me a greater freedom I could cope without the internet. The internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere. I enjoy spending time on social networking sites (like Facebook or twitter) The internet is a safe place to express my opinions The internet Is a good place to find a boyfriend and girlfriend 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

Opinions on the internet: internet users, *Agree, Average of 260 Countries, 2010

Figure 5 BBC World Service global public opinion poll

A poll of 27,973 adults in 26 countries, including 14,306 Internet users was conducted for the BBC World Service by the international polling firm GlobeScan using telephone and in-person interviews between 30 November 2009 and 7 February 2010.

60

50

40

30

20

10

0 Strongly Disagree Somewhat Disagree Somewhat Agree Strongly Agree No Answer

Figure 6 Access to the Internet Should Be a Fundamental Right of all People Most Internet users (53%) felt that the internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere.

Australia France Germany USA Brazil UK Egypt India Kenya Pakistan Russia Thailand Turkey China South Korea 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80

Figure 7 The Internet is a Safe Place to express my Opinions.

(Source: BBC (2010) Percentage of the internet users responding strongly agree or somewhat agree on the statement: The inter net is a safe place to express my Opinions)

35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 Extant of corporate State censorship of presence content Threats to privacy Violent and explicit content Fraud

Figure 8 Aspects of the internet causing most concern The aspects of the Internet that cause the most concern include: fraud (32%), violent and explicit content (27%), threats to privacy (20%), state censorship of content (6%), and the extent of corporate presence (3%).

What are the various Internet censorship techniques?

Internet Protocol (IP) address blocking The most straightforward way to block traffic on a router is to block the IP addresses of servers hosting offensive material. The IP address is the number used to uniquely identify every computer (server or client) on the Internet, so blocking the IP address of a given machine makes it inaccessible. A router already needs to examine the destination IP of every bit of data it handles, so the only extra cost of filtering based on the destination (or origin) IP is the cost to lookup the destination IP address in a table of blocked IP addresses. Such lookups require relatively little computing power even at the scale required for a country level backbone router, making IP blocking a cheap method of filtering traffic on a large scale. Access to a certain IP address is denied. If the target Web site is hosted in a shared hosting server, all websites on the same server

will be blocked. This affects IP-based protocols such as HTTP, FTP and POP. A typical circumvention method is to find proxies that have access to the target websites, but proxies may be jammed or blocked, and some Web sites, such as Wikipedia (when editing) also block proxies. Some large websites such as Google have allocated additional IP addresses to circumvent the block, but later the block was extended to cover the new addresses.

Domain name system (DNS) filtering and redirection Another way to filter traffic on the network is to block the lookup of DNS names of offensive sites. The DNS name is the plain text name generally used by end users to lookup a site (e.g., google.com). These DNS names are translated into IP addresses by DNS servers. To block specific DNS name lookups requires only removing those DNS zones from all of a countrys DNS servers. There are more DNS servers than backbone routers, but the number is still relatively small, and the work of maintaining DNS block lists can be outsourced to individual ISPs simply by distributing the list to the participating ISPs. Blocked domain names are not resolved or an incorrect IP address is returned. This affects all IP-based protocols such as HTTP, FTP and POP. A typical circumvention method is to find an alternative DNS root that resolves domain names correctly, but domain name servers are subject to blockage as well, especially IP address blocking. Another workaround is to bypass DNS if the IP address is obtainable from other sources and is not itself blocked. Examples are modifying the Hosts file or typing the IP address instead of the domain name as part of a URL given to a Web browser.

Uniform Resource Locator filtering: URL strings are scanned for target keywords regardless of the domain name specified in the URL. This affects the HTTP protocol. Typical circumvention methods are to use escaped characters in the URL, or to use encrypted protocols such as VPN and TLS/SSL.

Keyword blocking Denies access to websites based on the words found in pages or URIs, or blocks searches involving blacklisted terms. Advances are enabling increasingly dynamic, real-time analysis of content, but this is not yet in wide use. Keyword block filtering examines the content of the traffic, rather than merely the destination and can examine content in any part of a request,

including a specific URL in a web request or an offending keyword in an email. As such, keyword blocks can be much more precise than IP or DNS blocks, blocking only specific pages with a complete URL (http://hrw.org/china but not http://hrw.org/usa) or only specific pages with an offensive keyword (Taiwan independence). Keyword based blocking can be used for any Internet application that uses text, including web pages, email, and most instant messaging. Keyword blocking can be circumvented by encrypting all data sent over a connection, since encryption renders content into a form the filter cannot read. So a request that is blocked by a keyword filter as an HTTP request will not be blocked as an HTTPS request. Likewise, non-text data is generally impossible to filter by simple keyword filtering, since most such data must be interpreted as entire files, rather than as individual packets.

Packet filtering Terminate TCP packet transmissions when a certain number of controversial keywords are detected. This affects all TCP-based protocols such as HTTP, FTP and POP, but Search engine results pages are more likely to be censored. Typical circumvention methods are to use encrypted connections such as VPN and TLS/SSL to escape the HTML content, or by reducing the TCP/IPstacks MTU/MSS to reduce the amount of text contained in a given packet.

Connection reset If a previous TCP connection is blocked by the filter, future connection attempts from both sides can also be blocked for some variable amount of time. Depending on the location of the block, other users or websites may also be blocked, if the communication is routed through the blocking location. A circumvention method is to ignore the reset packet sent by the firewall.

Full block A technically simpler method of Internet censorship is to completely cut off all routers, either by software or by hardware (turning off machines, pulling out cables). This appears to have been the case on 27/28 January 2011 during the 2011 Egyptian protests, in what has been widely described as an unprecedented internet block. About 3500 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes to Egyptian networks were shut down from about 22:10 to 22:35 UTC 27 January. This full

block was implemented without cutting off major intercontinental fiber-optic links. Full blocks also occurred in Myanmar/Burma in 2007 and Libya in 2011.

Portal censorship and search result removal Major portals, including search engines, may exclude web sites that they would ordinarily include. This renders a site invisible to people who do not know where to find it. When a major portal does this, it has a similar effect as censorship. Sometimes this exclusion is done to satisfy a legal or other requirement, other times it is purely at the discretion of the portal. For example Google.de (http://www.google.de/) and Google.fr (http://www.google.fr/) remove Neo-Nazi and other listings in compliance with German and French law. Computer network attacks Denial-of-service attacks and attacks that deface opposition websites can produce the same result as other blocking techniques, preventing or limiting access to certain websites or other online services, although only for a limited period of time. This technique might be used during the lead up to an election or some other sensitive period. It is more frequently used by non-state actors seeking to disrupt services.

Forced proxy server / transparent proxy You have to specify a proxy server in your Internet Explorer settings in order to get a connection to the Internet. Sometimes, the ISP is using a transparent proxy. With these you cant see easily if there is a proxy or not. Every request you send to or receive from the Internet is checked at this server and redirected to you. Filtering can occur at forced proxy or transparent proxy.

Blocked ports Ports are like doors for a special service to a server or PC. They rank from 0 to 65535. The standard ports are from 0 to 1024; these are the well known ports. If a censor blocks a port, every traffic on this port is dropped, so its useless for you. Most censors block the ports 80, 1080, 3128 and 8080, because these are the common proxy ports. Because all of the proxies on common ports are useless for you, you have to find proxies that are listening on an uncommon port. These are very difficult to find.

Deep packet inspection (DPI) Most forms of filtering require some inspection of the content of a message, which could be derived from the identity of the source, header information, for example, or the actual content of the message, such as the words, strings of words or images in the message or on the website. Increasingly this involves what is called deep packet inspection. Deep packet inspection is the use of computer systems that can inspect packets sent over networks using the Internet Protocol suite in ways that enable a third party, not the sender or receiver, to identify particular aspects of the communication. Inspection is done by a middle-man, not an endpoint of a communication, using the actual content of the message. For example, ISPs can apply this technology for the lawful intercept of messages on public networks to determine if customers are using the network for unlawful purposes or purposes that violate their user agreements. Governments in North America, Asia and Africa use DPI for various purposes such as surveillance and censorship. DPI can serve as a one for all solution to monitor or regulate traffic and communication elements: e.g. the interception and logging of Internet traffic, enforcement of copyright, prioritizing limited bandwidth, and tracking users behavior.

Over- and under-blocking Technical censorship techniques are subject to both over- and under-blocking since it is often impossible to always block exactly the targeted content without blocking other permissible material or allowing some access to targeted material and so providing more or less protection than desired. An example is that automatic censorship against sexual words in matter for children, set to block the word cunt, has been known to block the Lincolnshire (UK) placename Scunthorpe. Another example is blocking an IP-address of a server that hosts multiple websites, which prevents access to all of the websites rather than just those that contain content deemed offensive. Internet filtering is almost impossible to accomplish with any degree of precision. Some filtering software blocks hate group sites. If a student is trying to research about skinheads or neoNazis, that information will be blocked on the Internet. Some software programs block any mention of the word sex and will therefore block out sites dealing with biological and botanical issues involving procreation. Filtering programs will block the word breast and therefore block information about breast cancer. Early Web filters would often block access to chicken breast recipes. The programs couldnt tell the difference between an innocent site about cooking and a

pornographic site, so they blocked all of them indiscriminately. A country that is deciding to filter the Internet must make an overbroador underbroad decision at the outset. The filtering regime will either block access to too much or too little Internet content. Very often, this decision is tied to whether the state opts to use a home-grown system or whether to adopt a commercial software product, such as SmartFilter or Websense, two products made in the United States and licensed to some states that filter the Internet. Bahrain, for instance, has opted for an underbroad solution for pornography; its ISPs appear to block access to a small and essentially fixed number of blacklisted sites. Bahrain may seek to indicate disapproval of access to pornographic material online, while actually blocking only token access to such material, much as Singapore does. United Arab Emirates, by contrast, seems to have made the opposite decision by attempting to block much more extensively in similar categories, thereby sweeping into its filtering basket a number of sites that appear to have innocuous content by any metric. Censorship opponents have some big problems with Web filtering software. Many Web filtering programs encrypt their blacklists, claiming that it helps minimize abuse. Opponents point out that the encrypted blacklist could also include Web pages that arent inappropriate at all, including pages that criticize the creators of the Web filter. Even if the programs creators arent blocking these sites on purpose, its easy for a Web filter to restrict access to the wrong sites. Thats because programs that search for keywords cant detect context.

Transparency of filtering or blocking activities Among the countries that filter or block online content, few openly admit to or fully disclose their filtering and blocking activities. States are frequently opaque and/or deceptive about the blocking of access to political information. For example: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are among the few states that publish detailed information about their filtering practices and display an acknowledgment to the user when accessing a blocked website. In contrast, countries such as China and Tunisia send users a false error indication. China blocks requests by users for a banned website at the router level and an error message is sent, effectively preventing the users IP address from making further http requests for a varying time, which appears to the user as time-out error with no explanation. Tunisia has altered the block page functionality of SmartFilter so that users attempting to access blocked websites receive a fake File not found error page. In Uzbekistan users are frequently sent block pages stating that the

website is blocked because of pornography, even when the page contains no pornography. Uzbeki ISPs may also redirect users request for blocked websites to unrelated websites, or sites similar to the banned websites, but with different information. When media was blocking my views on internet, it never admitted before people that they were blocking my views for whatever reason they have. I believe that if anybody is blocking internet content, he/she ought to have courage to tell the reason for blocking rather than hiding cowardly. Also, not giving reason for blocking amount to mala fide intention.

Internet circumvention technology Internet censorship circumvention is the processes used by technologically savvy Internet users to bypass the technical aspects of Internet filtering and gain access to otherwise censored material. Circumvention is an inherent problem for those wishing to censor the Internet, because filtering and blocking do not remove content from the Internet and as long as there is at least one publicly accessible uncensored system, it will often be possible to gain access to otherwise censored material. However, circumvention may not be very useful to non tech-savvy users and so blocking and filtering remain effective means of censoring the Internet for many users. There is a vast amount of energy, from commercial, non-profit and volunteer groups, devoted to creating tools and techniques to bypass Internet censorship, resulting in a number of methods to bypass Internet filters. Collectively, these are called circumvention methods, and can range from simple work-arounds, protected pathways, to complex computer programs. Different techniques and resources are used to bypass Internet censorship, including proxy websites, virtual private networks (VPN), sneakernets, and circumvention software tools. Solutions have differing ease of use, speed, security, and risks. Most, however, rely on gaining access to an Internet connection that is not subject to filtering, often in a different jurisdiction not subject to the same censorship laws. There are risks to using circumvention software or other methods to bypass Internet censorship. In some countries individuals that gain access to otherwise restricted content may be violating the law and if caught can be expelled, fired, jailed, or subject to other punishments and loss of access.

Circumvention Users

Users are individuals who use circumvention technologies to bypass Internet content filtering.

Circumvention Providers Install software on a computer in a non-filtered location and make connections to this computer available to those who access the Internet from a censored location. Circumvention providers can range from large commercial organizations offering circumvention services for a fee to individuals providing circumvention services for free.

Circumvention Technologies These are any tools, software, or methods used to bypass Internet filtering. These can range from complex computer programs to relatively simple manual steps, such as accessing a banned website stored on a search engines cache, instead of trying to access it directly. The decision to use circumvention technology should be taken seriously, carefully analyzing the specific needs, available resources, and security concerns of everyone involved. There is a wide variety of technologies available for users who want to circumvent Internet filtering. However, using them for successful and stable circumvention service depends on a variety of factors, including the users level of technical skill, potential security risk, and contacts available outside the censored jurisdiction. Many technologically savvy users can find alternative methods to access blocked content. However, for most people, blocking is an effective means for preventing access. Nevertheless, as filtering or blocking content does not erase the original content, some users can still access the content by using other connections for which access has not been blocked, creating a cat and mouse game between actors seeking to gain or block access to particular content. The fact that websites are not removed, but blocked, can mean that, for example in the case of child protection, the content has not been destroyed, but it has been made invisible for most non tech-savvy users. While there are some outspoken supporters and opponents of Internet censorship, its not always easy to divide everyone into one camp or another. Not everyone uses the same tactics to accomplish goals. Some opponents of censorship challenge government policies in court. Others take the role of information freedom fighters, providing people with clandestine ways to access information.

Circumvention sites and tools should be provided and operated by trusted third parties located outside the censoring jurisdiction that do not collect identities and other personal information. Best are trusted family and friends personally known to the circumventor, but when family and friends are not available, sites and tools provided by individuals or organizations that are only known by their reputations or through the recommendations and endorsement of others may need to be used. Commercial circumvention services may provide anonymity while surfing the Internet, but could be compelled by law to make their records and users personal information available to law enforcement. There is no absolutely effective filtering or circumvention methods. The battle between those who would filter and those who would circumvent that filtering turns on the amount of resources each side expends and the effectiveness of those resources. So there are always ways to filter a piece of information if the filterer is willing expends enough resources, and there are always ways to circumvent a filter if the circumventor is willing to expend enough resources. The goal is to find tools that meet users needs cheaply, and require disproportionate resources to block. Hiding your IP address, using a proxy, using the onion router & obtaining an IP address to a website so you wont have to rely on a public DNS server these seem like a very intimidating task for the unprepared or novice internet user. You have to choose to bypass the Internet censorship or not. I can only educate you about circumvention technology but I cant take any responsibility for misuse/abuse by you. In several censor countries you will go to jail if they catch you, in a lot of companies you will get fired and some schools will ban you. Of course, the censors not only block Internet traffic, they are also looking at it (in countries/companies with a little Internet population) and try to find out who is bypassing their firewall and how. An easy way to find out who (and how) is bypassing the firewall is by just looking for some identicators in the log files.
What could be government policy and/or laws regarding Internet censorship in various countries around the world?

As in 2002, Government policies concerning censorship of the Internet may be broadly grouped into four categories:

Government policy to encourage Internet industry self-regulation and end-user voluntary use of filtering/blocking technologies This approach is taken in the United Kingdom, Canada, and a considerable number of Western European countries. It also appears to be the current approach in New Zealand where applicability of offline classification/censorship laws to content on the Internet seems less than clear. In these countries laws of general application apply to illegal Internet content such as child pornography and incitement to racial hatred. Content unsuitable for minors is not illegal to make available on the Internet, nor must access to same be controlled by a restricted access system. Some (perhaps all) such governments encourage the voluntary use of, and ongoing development of, technologies that enable Internet users to control their own, and their childrens, access to content on the Internet. Criminal law penalties (fines or jail terms) applicable to content providers who make content unsuitable for minors available online This approach is taken in some Australian State jurisdictions and has been attempted in the USA (although no such US Federal law is presently enforceable, and to the best of EFAs knowledge nor is any such US State law). In these countries, in addition, laws of general application apply to content that is illegal for reasons other than its unsuitability for children, such as child pornography. Government mandated blocking of access to content deemed unsuitable for adults This approach is taken in Australian Commonwealth law (although it has not been enforced in this manner to date) and also in, for example, China, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam. Some countries require Internet access providers to block material while others only allow restricted access to the Internet through a government controlled access point.

Government prohibition of public access to the Internet A number of countries either prohibit general public access to the Internet, or require Internet users to be registered/licensed by a government authority before permitting them restricted access as in (3) above. Information on countries in this category is available in the Reporters without Borders report as Enemies of the Internet.