Access Denied

Access Denied Review

Published in the Guardian

Seth Finkelstein has written a thoughtful review of the OpenNet Initiative’s new book Access Denied in the Guardian. Seth says ” It’s a primer in methods and an atlas of studies. The first sections provide an analytical framework. Then prohibitions are examined across dozens of countries. The results show that far from the earlier idea of the internet destroying nations, nations are, arguably, domesticating the internet (or at least trying hard).” He concludes that “Access Denied will certainly become a standard reference. But it’s sadly not clear whether it will be more as a foundation for anti-censorship efforts – or as an initial chronicle of how visions of freedom turned into realities of control.”

Review of Access Denied + BBC on psiphon

Reviewed in BBC.co.uk

Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering challenges the long-standing assumption that the internet is an unfettered space where citizens from around the world can freely communicate and mobilise. In fact, the book makes it clear that the scope, scale and sophistication of net censorship are growing.

“There’s been a conventional wisdom or myth that the internet was immune from state regulation,” says Ronald Deibert, one of the book’s editors.

“What we’re finding is that states that were taking a hands-off approach to the internet for many years are now finding ways to intervene at key internet choke points, and block access to information.”

Mr. Deibert heads The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. The Lab, along with Harvard Law School, the University of Cambridge, and Oxford University, has spent the last five years testing internet access in some 40 countries.

The full review is here

There is also a short story about Internet censorship in China, with a mention of psiphon here

BBC The World Today and CBC The World at Six

There were two radio reports about various aspects of the Citizen Lab’s research and development activities yesterday.

Clark Boyd did a report about the OpenNet Initiative’s new book, Access Denied on BBC’s The World Today.

I have uploaded a version of that broadcast locally here

Additionally, Eli Glasner did a report on the use of our new psiphon service with respect to ongoing events in Tibet and elsewhere, for CBC’s The World at Six.

I have uploaded a version of that broadcast locally here as well.

Eli’s story is notable for, among other things, the participation of our friend and colleague from Privaterra Robert Guerra. And it looks like there is an online print version of the story here

CBC Search Engine, Nature, and Digital Nation

Some recent items on psiphon, the ONI’s new volume, Access Denied, and others to report:

I did an interview with Jesse Brown of CBC’s search engine on psiphon. The full interview, including Mike Hull’s psiphon theme song, is available here
(Note: The interview with me starts at 16 minutes, 15 seconds into the podcast).

Bruce Schneier wrote a review of the ONI’s new volume Access Denied in the recent issue of Nature. A pdf of the review can be downloaded here.

Lastly, I recently had the pleasure of appearing on The Digital Age with James Goodale. The full interview has been posted on google video here.

Access Denied review: IEEE Spectrum

“In the dot-com heyday of the ’90s and early 2000s…there was a myth that the Internet can’t be controlled,” says Ronald Deibert, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “There was some mysterious, magical property associated with it that will route around censorship.” The most exhaustive study yet of Internet censorship—Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, published this month by the MIT Press—pretty much disproves that notion.

From IEEESpectrum