Author: Ron

ONI to Present China Report before US Congressional Committee

We will be releasing our upcoming report on China’s Internet censorship regime before a US Congressional Committee this coming Thursday. Here is the media advisory. Our own Nart Villeneuve will be presenting along with our Harvard colleagues John Palfrey and Derek Bambauer. Does anyone know if it is televised or streamed online?

Bahrain Internet Censorship Report Released

The OpenNet Initiative’s testing of more than 6,000 sites in Bahrain revealed only eight sites blocked. Three were pornographic; the others covered political and religious topics. In each case, sites with similar content remained accessible, and altering the requested URL slightly made several filtered sites available. Bahrain’s legal system includes extensive potential controls of media, telecommunications, and the Internet, and its technical infrastructure has a single primary Internet Service Provider (ISP) and state-mandated Internet exchange point (IXP); this makes filtering relatively easy to implement.
Our testing suggests that Bahrain’s filtering efforts have eased recently, but the recent arrests of the editors of a Web site, and the blocking of the site, indicate that Bahrain continues to combine technical and legal controls for on-line content. (Full Report – HTML)

Foreign Policy Article on Saudi Black Market

I honestly can’t remember giving this interview, but I must have because there’s a quotation that sounds like something I’d say in this short Foreign Policy article on a black market for net access in Saudi Arabia. Two notes of clarification: I’m not the Exec Director of the OpenNet Initiative. There isn’t one. I’m one of the principal investigators, but it’s really a team effort. And the black market is actually referenced by us in a footnote to another report.

Contrabandwidth

BY KATE PALMER | MARCH 1, 2005

People can get almost anything on the black market — drugs, passports, even human organs. Now add Web sites to the list. Inside many authoritarian regimes that closely monitor and censor the Internet, access to blocked Web sites has become a black market commodity like any other. Typically, the process is simple: Savvy black marketers in cybercafes, universities, private homes, and elsewhere exploit technological loopholes to circumvent government filters and charge fees for access. According to the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) (www.opennetinitiative.net), a research organization devoted to tracking blocked Web sites, black market access to filtered pages in Saudi Arabia runs anywhere from $26 to $67 per Web site.

Such tactics are becoming increasingly common. Shahin Amard, who runs a Web site (www.derafsh-kaviyani.com, blocked in Iran for its unsanctioned religious content) from an undisclosed location, says that people constantly “e-mail from inside Iran and ask for direction, help, and advice” in gaining access to the Web. But, he says, “the majority of people … give up when they don’t get through, or they get scared and don’t try anymore.”

Sometimes, it is the authoritarians that profit from the illegal trade. In Cuba, where Fidel Castro presides over one of the world’s most technologically repressive regimes, the Communist government limits Internet access both by making the Web prohibitively expensive and by blocking unsuitable material (roughly defined as any site that doesn’t promote Cuban tourism). Only a small minority of state officials are allowed limited Internet access. Yet computers are widely accessible. And, according to Philip Peters, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, many state officials sell passwords and account information on the black market for monthly fees of about $20 to $30. Buyers, Peters says, use the Net access to visit free online e-mail services to connect with friends and family in other countries or to read foreign news sources.

So, will buying access to blocked Web sites remain a part of the black market bazaar? As long as governments try to restrict what sites their citizens can visit, the answer is probably yes. But ONI Executive Director Ronald Deibert warns that government censorship “is spreading worldwide, and…the countries that are doing it are getting better at it.” Which means the price is going up.

UAE Internet Filtering Study

Internet Filtering in the United Arab Emirates in 2004-2005: A Country Study

 The OpenNet Initiative announces the release of its study documenting Internet filtering in the United Arab Emirates. ONI tested over 8000 Web sites in the past six months, finding that UAE blocks material viewed as culturally
inappropriate or offensive to the state’s perception of Islam. The study notes that UAE relies on American software (SmartFilter) to implement its filtering, and points out that UAE’s system suffers from considerable overblocking that
prevents its citizens from accessing content unrelated to the state’s expressed goals.

The full country study is available here.
…expect more of these country reports soon.

Hacking the Kyrgyz Internet during Parliamentary Elections

Our ONI team has just put out this press release on the Kyrgyz parliamentary elections, which we monitored from afar and in the field. Websites belonging to political parties and independent media were subject to unexplained technical failures and deliberate hacking that suggest a deliberate attempt to interfere with the functioning of the Internet during election period. Some good work by Nart and our friends in the field.