We are pleased to announce a new project this summer in the Citizen Lab, called the “Global Network Initiative Monitor” or “GNI Monitor” for short.
The project’s mission statement can be downloaded here.
The project will combine technical and contextual research methods to measure compliance of both participants and non-participants to the GNI principles, as well as evaluate the GNI process overall.
Related:
CBC News “Tech Giants to be rated on Human Rights,” Tuesday 21 July 2009, More Here
A few months ago when a Canadian research group exposed the GhostNet, a brazen cyber-espionage network, the story briefly made headlines. Most of us marvelled at the ingenuity and nefariousness of the alleged perpetrator, the Chinese government. Some may have momentarily fretted about implications for international security. But the man who helped break the GhostNet story, Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, says the implications are at once more far-reaching and more immediate — especially, perhaps, for lawyers.
Recently, the Canadian envoy to Iran was called in and admonished by Iranian officials for contributing to the destabilitization of the regime because of support for social networking tools, like Twitter and Facebook. The envoy must have scratched his head in puzzlement.
The Iranians’ furor was ignited by the work of our company, Psiphon, which is based in Canada and has actively engaged in a campaign to help Iranians bypass their country’s filters and exercise basic human rights of access to information and freedom of speech. On average, one Iranian per minute has signed up to our “right-2know” nodes — customized websites pushed into Iran that contain access to BBC Persian and Radio Farda — and more than 15,000 have used our service since the crisis began.
However, we have received no support from the Canadian government — not even a note of thanks. As far as we know, the Canadian government does not even have a cyberspace strategy (of promoting access to information and freedom of speech) about which a country like Iran would be irritated. As Canadians, we wish it did.
Psiphon’s activities in Iran are not the first of their kind to generate intense media interest. Just a few months ago, a related project of ours, the Information Warfare Monitor, published a report called Tracking GhostNet that discovered a cyber-espionage system infecting government ministries and embassies in more than 103 countries. The case was splashed across the front pages of newspapers, and produced a powerful curiosity about cyber security around the world that continues unabated.
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I did an interview with NPR’s Here and Now about psiphon and The Use of Proxy Servers in Iran.
There is a lot going on right now on so many exciting fronts. We at the OpenNet Initiative have released three major reports: An Asian regional overview, and country reports on China and Iran. We released these at the ONI Asia regional meeting in Penang Malaysia. Thanks to the ONI team for all of their hard work.
You can read about ONI Asia results here, and the Iran country report here
Second, we have been actively engaged in a campaign to allow Iranians to access the Internet freely via Psiphon, using Twitter and other outreach tools. The Globe and Mail has a report on it, among other media stories.
The OpenNet Initiative has released a bulletin entitled “China’s Green Dam: The Implications of Government Control Encroaching on the Home PC.” You can read more about it here.
A recent directive by the Chinese government requires the installation of a specific filtering software product, Green Dam, with the publicly stated intent of protecting children from harmful Internet content. The proposed implementation of software as reviewed in this report would in fact have an influence that extends beyond helping parents protect their children from age inappropriate material; the filtering options include blocking of political and religious content normally associated with the Great Firewall of China, China’s sophisticated national-level filtering system. If implemented as proposed, the effect would be to increase the reach of Internet censorship to the edges of the network, adding a new and powerful control mechanism to the existing filtering system.
As a policy decision, mandating the installation of a specific software product is both unprecedented and poorly conceived. In this specific instance, the mistake is compounded by requiring the use of a substandard software product that interferes with the performance of personal computers in an unpredictable way, killing browsers and applications without warning while opening up users to numerous serious security vulnerabilities. The level of parental control over the software is poor such that this software does not well serve parents that wish to the limit exposure of their children to Internet content.
The mandate requiring the installation of a specific product serves no useful purpose apart from extending the reach of government authorities. Given the resulting poor quality of the product, the large negative security and stability effects on the Chinese computing infrastructure and the intense backlash against the product mandate, the mandate may result in less government control.
President Obama announced the US Cybersecurity strategy yesterday, after a lengthy review. The report can be found here. I was asked, along with Bruce Shneier, James Bamford, Gus Hosein, Mykko Hoppenin, and Marjorie Blumenthal, to give feedback for the New York Times forum.
Dave Levine of Stanford University host’s a regular radio show called Hearsay Culture. I was a guest a while back and the show is archived here.
Inspired by Google’s Summer of Code, this year, Psi-Lab — a joint project of the Citizen Lab and Psiphon Inc — will organize the “Summer of Psi”, which aims to establish a rich and highly interactive set of communication and archiving tools and accompanying documentation to enable community participation in Psiphon open source development. Expect to see a newly invigorated forum, documentation, development tasks, and other interactive features earmarked for the open source community. Citizen Lab research associate Jeremy Vernon is driving the summer of psi.
Follow the blog here.
Last night in Toronto, at the new Psiphon digs, we held our public launch of Psiphon Inc — the first company to be spun out of the Citizen Lab. Although Psiphon is spinning out, its relationship with the Citizen Lab is stronger than ever. We have developed a strategic partnership with Psiphon around Psi-LAB — which will be the home for research and development, red team threat modeling, and curation of all that is open source.
One of the most exciting aspects of the new Psiphon service is the “right2know” nodes, where denied content can be pushed to users in censored jursidictions and users, in turn, can sign up for the psiphon service, or simply use the right2know nodes for free without subscription. Find out more here.
Thanks to Rafal, Nart, Mike, Jane, Dirk, Rod, Adam, Jeremy, Jaymz, Greg, Eugene, Vlad, and everyone else involved in the Psiphon project!