12

Oct

LibTech: Practitioners’ Panel Strikes Back

Disclaimer: I have done my best to transcribe the comments of these speakers at the conference on Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes, and I apologize for any errors.

Here are a few of the most interesting tidbits from the third and final practitioners’ panel:

  • Bob Boorstin of Google: asks the audience “What do you want Google to do?”
  • Bob Boorstin of Google: Governments are to blame, not companies. If Google had their druthers, they’d show everything.
  • Bob Boorstin of Google: There is a questions of company power and company leverage, but that leverage is limited. Google didn’t have the ability to push back Chinese censorship policy.
  • Bob Boorstin of Google: There are things that companies can do, like making their products open and safe by providing https access and not putting servers in unfree countries.
  • Bob Boorstin of Google:Google is trying to set and example for governments and other companies with their Transparency Reports and their participation in the Global Network Initiative.
  • Bob Boorstin of Google: Working too closely with governments can also damage Google’s credibility with users.
  • Janice Trey of Global Information Freedom Consortium: Her organization is the creator of the circumvention technologies Ultrasurf and Freegate.
  • Janice Trey of Global Information Freedom Consortium: “There’s no freedom without freedom of information and no freedom of information without freedom of the Internet.”
  • Janice Trey of Global Information Freedom Consortium: They have about 300,000 people using their tools every day in China, and got 1 million users in Iran during the Green Revolution, which crashed their servers.
  • Janice Trey of Global Information Freedom Consortium: Many of their developers were inspired by the 1989 Tienanmen massacre, which affected some directly, as well as persecution of Falun Gong.
  • Janice Trey of Global Information Freedom Consortium: All of their tools are portable on a USB stick, leave not trace on the computer, and use encryption so they are indistinguishable from other https traffic. They have a very good record on user safety.
  • Janice Trey of Global Information Freedom Consortium: It took 8 days to create a tool called Green Tsunami to detect, disable, and remove the Green Dam censorship technology.
  • Janice Trey of Global Information Freedom Consortium: Proposes that 5% penetration of circumvention tools in a national internet creates enough breaks in a censorship system to render it significantly inoperable.
  • Nathan Freitas of NYU and the Guardian Project: How to bring together nonviolent civil resistance theory with new technology to create a new discipline – Otpor and Android, Gene Sharp and Steve Jobs.
  • Nathan Freitas of NYU and the Guardian Project: Success means training + technology + strategy. Liberation technology alone is not enough.
  • Nathan Freitas of NYU and the Guardian Project: They accomplished seven pro-Tibet protests leading up to and during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, many using livestreaming cell phone video.
  • Nathan Freitas of NYU and the Guardian Project: He has created a smartphone app that pre-filters human faces from video with black boxes as the video is captured, preventing the video from then being used to identify activists.
  • Nathan Freitas of NYU and the Guardian Project: Kungleng App for iPhone for Voice of America Tibetan coming soon.
  • Ron Deibert of Citizen Lab: Google should provide resources for activists affected by DDoS attacks. (non-panelist commenter)
  • Nathan Freitas of NYU and the Guardian Project: Would like to see money used for small grants for individual implementations and for education.
  • Janice Trey of Global Information Freedom Consortium: Tools are not open source in order to protect


That’s all folks! Hope you enjoyed these posts.

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12

Oct

LibTech: Dan Calingaert on US Policy

Disclaimer: I have done my best to transcribe the comments of these speakers at the conference on Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes, and I apologize for any errors.

Dan Calingaert, Deputy Director of Programs at Freedom House, clarifies that addressing supporting Internet freedom is merely an extension of defending human right in general. He presents five ways that organization like his own can carry this out:

  1. Support and defend international norms of cyberspace
  2. Condemn human rights abuses
  3. Support human rights defenders by acting as advocates and through material assistance
  4. Use diplomacy channels where available
  5. Prevent private companies from contributing to human rights abuses


In terms of US policy, he argues that US should try to shift international policy norms to openness on the net, not attempt to bring freedom through the Internet, which is too ambitious. He then analyzes current US policy on international Internet freedom:

  • US govt. speaks out on some digital freedom of expression cases, such as Iran, but not all.
  • Funding on Internet freedom, both effective and less effective.
  • When there are competing interest, the decision is usually made against Internet freedom.
  • The US does not criticize the closed Internet policy of its friend, like Saudi Arabia.
  • US policy is reactive, speaking out when an abuse is made, but not trying to prevent these abuses.
  • Secretary Clinton publicly urged US companies to not take part in foreign censorship and surveillance, but this is not a reasonable request, especially for smaller companies.


Here are his policy suggestions:

  • Help US companies resist cooperation in censorship that goes beyond the Global Network Initiative (GNI), such as mandating some level of transparency, such as Google’s Transparency Report initiative. Regulation would put all companies on a level playing field in what they could and could not participate in.
  • Support the open and unitary structure of the Internet by resisting efforts to create national intranets.
  • Limit Internet freedom only in a way that is narrowly defined, transparent, and subject to judicial oversight.
  • Cooperate with other democratic nations, particularly in Europe, to create and promote international norms, such as getting these nations to sign on to the GNI.

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12

Oct

LibTech: Walid Al-Saqaf on Circumvention

Disclaimer: I have done my best to transcribe the comments of these speakers at the conference on Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes, and I apologize for any errors. [UPDATED]

Walid Al-Saqaf, is the founder of the news aggregator YemenPortal.net, which was blocked in Yemen on January 19th, 2008, following his coverage of a major protest in southern Yemen. As a censored online media producer her was left with three choices:

  1. Self-censorship through filtering his own content
  2. Shut down the site
  3. Resist the censorship by helping visitors get to his site


He chose the third choice. He created his own proxy server to assist with circumvention and moved his content from one URL to another, using mirroring. He realized this cat-and-mouse game was unsustainable. He then created a Firefox plugin and this made it easier to visitors to his site than by using a block-able proxy server. This was successful, and traffic from Yemen returned to his site.

His newest project is called Al Kasir (alkasir.com), which means “circumventor” in Arabic. The browser-style software first checks queries against a list of censored sites, only accepting queries for censored content that is not related to pornography or hacking. Other queries are sent directly to the open web. This allows the software to function while using minimum bandwidth. He is able to track blocked sites through a system of automated tests of listed sites, which are verified by moderators. Though he focused his service on Middle East users, the service now has many Chinese users. The Al Kasir site also has an interactive map that shows which sites are blocked in which country.

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12

Oct

LibTech: Return of Practitioners’ Panel

Disclaimer: I have done my best to transcribe the comments of these speakers at the conference on Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes, and I apologize for any errors.

Here are a few of the most interesting tidbits from the second practitioners’ panel:

  • Carl Gershman of the National Endowment for Democracy: I’m skeptical of big bureaucratic democracy-building initiatives. I’m more in favor of helping people do what they are already doing, out of the limelight. But I don’t want to let the US government off the hook in taking action in this area. (Paraphrased)
  • Carl Gershman of the National Endowment for Democracy: Freedom of the Internet or freedom by the Internet? I think we should be for both. (Paraphrased)
  • Bob Boorstin of Google: It’s dangerous to promise big with regard to Internet freedom without a big plan for realization. Policy movement in any administration is very difficult. (non-panelist commenter)
  • Ali Akbar Mousavi formerly of the Iranian Parliament: Iranian government jams satellite signals, supposedly to prevent the broadcast of pornography. The Cuban government assisted in this, but later stopped.
  • Ali Akbar Mousavi formerly of the Iranian Parliament: Companies like Nokia-Siemens, Ericsson, Huawei, and ZTE sell wire-tapping, tracking and filtering technology to Iran. Third-party companies also play a role, acting as middle-men.
  • Ali Akbar Mousavi formerly of the Iranian Parliament:The Iranian government has gained access to activists’ Yahoo email accounts, but apparently not yet to Gmail accounts. This may be a result of security features or collaboration with authorities.
  • Nathan Freitas of Guardian Project: If Balatarin.com is the Digg of Iran, is Caucasian Knot the Huffington Post of the Caucasus? (non-panelist commenter)
  • Gregory Shvedov of Caucasian Knot: Crowdsourcing is not the same as crowd-sharing. Crowdsourcing is a pull from the center (“You, member of the crowd, give me info”), crowd-sharing is a push (“I, a member of the crowd, want to share this info.”)
  • Carl Gershman of the National Endowment for Democracy: On the issue of Liu Xiaobo, China is in the position to really humiliate itself. Why is he still in prison? We should increase pressure on this issue.
  • Troy Etulain of USAID: The $15 million of funding for Internet freedom which the State Department has now was initiated by Congress. The State Department did not request the money. (non-panelist commenter)

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11

Oct

LibTech: Rebecca MacKinnon on Networked Authoritarianism

Disclaimer: I have done my best to transcribe the comments of these speakers at the conference on Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes, and I apologize for any errors.

China specialist Rebecca MacKinnon begins with the coverage of Liu Xiaobo’s receipt of the Nobel prize. When she tried to post this piece of news on three local Chinese sites, including Baidu and Sina, she was blocked from posting with a moderation message. “You can wait to be moderated,” she notes, “as you can wait for Godot.” In other words, it won’t get published. On the micro-blogging site Sohu the name Liu Xiaobo is removed from the post when it is published. This is what faces Chinese authors when they try to publish on political topics.

This censorship is being outsourced to the private sector, it is not being done by the government. They are reinforcing the networked authoritarian state. The stick is that businesses that do not censor effectively lose their licenses. In addition to financial success, a carrot is the “self-discipline awards” for successful self-policing sites, which are put on annually by the government.

She notes that Lokman Tsui’s paper on “Iron Curtain 2.0” does a good job explaining that this is a new form of authoritarianism. It’s not a wall, it’s a hydro-electric dam. Like a torrent of water, China both needs and fears information, and does not fully block it but controls it. Scholar Min Jiang has also developed a good typology of online civic spaces in China: government propaganda, commercial government-controlled spaces, emergent NGO spaces (which are often the victim of cyber attack, international diaspora spaces that are free by often inaccessible.

Networked (or deliberative) authoritarianism allows China to increase its legitimacy. For example, a challenge to the one-child policy was allow to stay up on a government platform, where the idea was debated. Scholar Yongnian Zheng makes a distinction between “voice” activism, which critiques inefficiencies or local corrupotion and thus strengthens the regimes by allowing it to root out ineffectiveness, “exit” activism that challenge the authoritarian system itself find no space and results in imprisonment and web site shut-down.

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11

Oct

LibTech: Evgeny Morozov on Internet Freedom

Disclaimer: I have done my best to transcribe the comments of these speakers at the conference on Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes, and I apologize for any errors.

Blogger Evgeny Morozov addresses the importance of socio-political as well as technological controls on Internet freedom. As an example, he identifies a recent law in Thailand that makes the creations of social media platforms legally responsible for user generated content, making self-censorship likely. He says that we don’t know how to address the socio-political context. As anti-censorship tools improve, control will not evaporate, they will simply find non-technological ways to control speech. By creating purely technological tools to address technological challenges to Internet freedom, we are missing socio-political avenues of control.

On the technological side, we notes that DDoS attacks are more damaging than censorship and blocking. In the former case, the onus is on the content producer to provide access, in the latter case the onus is on the audience. The real costs of DDoS as a means of oppressing dissent are more costly to the content producer, not only financial, but also psychological. We don’t have the means of addressing this on an international level.

Another method of control is attacking the legitimacy and communication capacity of online communities of opposition. This results in a limitation of their ability to disseminate information, mobilize, mobilize and grow. A variety of techniques, from paid trolls to hacked DDoS attack can be used to attack these communities.

Authoritarian governments are also building local alternatives to Internet services. One of the most disturbing examples is a Turkish effort to create their own national search engine and provide each citizen from a national government email. Iran and Russia is making similar efforts. It is unclear how these efforts are connected. Morozov predicts that this will be detrimental to freedom of expression and that these services may become industries of national importance, increasing surveillance and control.

A lot depends on whether the Internet Freedom agenda or the Internet Control agenda succeeds in the US, where the State Department supports the former and the Department of Commerce and Defense support the latter.

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11

Oct

LibTech: Ron Deibert on Institutions

Disclaimer: I have done my best to transcribe the comments of these speakers at the conference on Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes, and I apologize for any errors.

Ron Deibert, the Director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, talks about supra-national organizations that are forming international Internet policy norms.

International Institution: The International Telecommunications Unions, ICANN, and Internet Governance Forum were previously written off, but countries are now engaging in these organizations more meaningfully, including China’s attempts to validate its national policies international. Look at the reaction to encryption by Research in Motion, creators of the Blackberry, in countries as diverse as India and United Arab Emirates. The United States Cyber Commands is also setting a standard in preparations for cyber war.

Regional Organizations are also being used to normalized policies, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Commercial Institutions: The $80 billion international cyber-security sector is particularly influence in developing surveillance, such as deep packet inspection, and cyber war tactics.

We tend to see authoritarian governments as being inward-looking, yet we are seeing more examples of how they are taking the lead from other countries and international organizations.

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11

Oct

LibTech: Practitioners’ Panel

Disclaimer: I have done my best to transcribe the comments of these speakers at the conference on Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes, and I apologize for any errors.

Here are a few of the most interesting tidbits from the practitioners’ panel:

  • Hugo Landa of CubaNet: In Cuba, the new national saint is “Saint USB,” where people once had a figure of the Virgin Mary hanging on their neck, they now have a USB drive. Cell phones (legalized in 2008) are also a status symbol.
  • Ishimaru Jiro of Rimjin-gang Magazine: It is possible to use a Chinese cell phone to talk about 2-3 kilometers over the Chinese borders using Chinese radio towers to transmit. Jiro uses this to collect reports from North Korean citizen journalists for his magazine.
  • Ishimaru Jiro of Rimjin-gang Magazine: There are now approximately 300,000 cell phones in North Korea, though most have very limited capability.
  • Ishimaru Jiro of Rimjin-gang Magazine: Most common form of subversive media in North Korea is smuggled VCDs of Chinese movies and South Korean soap operas. Though this is not directly political, it does create an awareness that South Korea and even communist China has a better standard of living than North Korea, countering official propaganda.
  • Hugo Landa of CubaNet: Now up to 50% of the visitors to CubaNet come from within Cuba, an indicator of the increase in Internet access.
  • Hugo Landa of CubaNet: There are now about 100 bloggers in Cuba.
  • Ishimaru Jiro of Rimjin-gang Magazine: The best gift you could give to a North Korean is a satellite cell phone, so they can talk with the outside world from anywhere in the country.
  • Esra’a El Shafei of Mideast Youth: Their newest project, CrowdVoice.org, helps activists crowdsource information on their causes.
  • Hugo Landa of CubaNet: Orlando Zapata’s cyber-hunger strike in 2010 drew greater attention because it was covered through Twitter and email. Though he died, another activist continued the strike and the Cuban government agreed to free political prisoners 3 months after Orlando’s death.

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11

Oct

LibTech: Mehdi Yahyanejad on Iran

Disclaimer: I have done my best to transcribe the comments of these speakers at the conference on Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes, and I apologize for any errors.

Mehdi Yahyanejad was a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford as well as being a trained physicist and software developer. One popular project, Balatarin.com, is similar to Digg and covers politics and social news in Farsi. He begins with a background on the 2009 elections, noting that Mousavi and Karoubi were the reformist candidate, while Ahmedinijad was the conservative incumbent, all with strong revolutionary credentials.

Facebook and Twitter were unblocked in January of 2009, for unknown reasons. Possible motivations include the desire to track conversations and to present a more open facade to western journalists. Though SMS was used for campaigning, these services were shut down on election day. When Ahmedinejad was announced the winner with 63% of the vote citizens, particularly in more progresstive Tehran where Mousavi was popular, believe some fraud has occurred. The key here was again an information cascade. The Internet was not shut down. Though being suspicious of an election outcome was not unusual, the Internet allowed people to know that their fellow citizens shared their skepticism, giving strength to their own feelings and leading to further expressions of dissent.

Protests began on June 15th and the government crackdown on the 20th, the day Neda Agha Sultan was shot. Street protests ended but action did re-emerged on days when sanctioned public rallies occurred. such as the official annual anti-Israel rally. These protests were organized through the Internet, particularly to distribute news and coordinate. The Internet still provides some sense of anonymity.

Next he specifically addresses the idea of the “Twitter Revolution.” He argues that YouTube was actually the more critical technology. The mainstream media had two poles, human interest stories from more liberal journalists and nuclear stories from conservative ones. YouTube, particularly the Neda video, brought attention to human rights issues and to native opposition. It took only three hours between Neda’s murder to its posting on YouTube. Another video, which showed how the militia (Basij?) were attacking Mousavi’s headquarters showed the viciousness of the government reaction. The Iranian government has reacted by slowing Internet speed, attacking sites with DDoS attacks, and arresting webmasters.

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11

Oct

LibTech: Xiao Qiang on China

Disclaimer: I have done my best to transcribe the comments of these speakers at the conference on Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes, and I apologize for any errors.

Xiao Qiang is the next speaker at the conference on Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes. He is a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, Principle Investigator at Counter-Power Labs, and founder of the China Digital Times. He starts by starting that by 2013, 53% of the Chinese population will be online and a quote by Hu Jintao about the importance of maintaining socialist culture and the stability of the state as the Internet grows. As a result, there is registration of web site owners and many filters for publication on the average Chinese news site. He also shows a map-like image of different arms of the government encircling and controlling the content available to Chinese citizens.

Despite this, the Internet has allowed a resistance discourse to exist that was not possible in the broadcast era. It has also allowed forbidden discourse to exist outside of China. As examples of resistance discourse, he gives the examples of the viral sateirical memes of “river crab” (homonym for “harmony” and a critique of censorship – “my blog was harmonized”). It allows bloggers to speak of censorship under the radar (these discussions are not blocked inside China). Another is “grass mud horse,” (“f*ck you mother”) and “valley dove” (“don’t be evil”, motto of Google ), the opponent of the river crab, which are depicted in videos, images, and cartoons inside China. “35th of May” is new to me, it is a way of talking about the Tiananmen massacre, which occurred in April.

“It is not only resistance, it is visible resistance,” says Qiang. Regardless of the source of these memes, there has been an information cascade effect, changing the way the public views censorship. A recent poll showed that 48% hate the censorship of the Great Fire Wall, and 38% believe it should be taken down.

“So what? Where does it lead for China,” says Qiang. There is a increased discourse on universal values, on the right to know, participate, express, and control. The number of people talking about the memes and has increased dramatically in the past few years, though it remains a tiny percentage of the number of total blog posts in China – the online opposition in tiny but growing.

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