Ronald Deibert - Access Denied. The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering

Access Denied

The Information Revolution and Global Politics

William J. Drake and Ernest J. Wilson III, editors
mitpress.mit.edu/IRGP-series

The Information Revolution and Developing Countries
Ernest J. Wilson III, 2004

Human Rights in the Global Information Society
edited by Rikke Frank Jrgensen, 2006

Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective
Manuel Castells, Mirela Fernndez-Ardvol, Jack Linchuan Qiu, and Araba Sey, 2007

Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering
edited by Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain, 2008

2008 The President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Access denied : the practice and policy of global Internet filtering / edited by Ronald Deibert... [et al.].

p. cm. (The information revolution & global politics series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-54196-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-262-04245-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. ComputersAccess control. 2. InternetCensorship. 3. InternetGovernment policy.
I. Deibert, Ronald.
QA76.9.A25.A275 2008
005.8dc22

2007010334

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Foreword

Janice Stein

Preface

John Palfrey

Introduction

Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey

1 Measuring Global Internet Filtering

Robert Faris and Nart Villeneuve

2 Internet Filtering: The Politics and Mechanisms of Control

Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey

3 Tools and Technology of Internet Filtering

Steven J. Murdoch and Ross Anderson

4 Filtering and the International System: A Question of Commitment

Mary Rundle and Malcolm Birdling

5 Reluctant Gatekeepers: Corporate Ethics on a Filtered Internet

Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey

6 Good for Liberty, Bad for Security? Global Civil Society and the Securitization of the Internet

Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski

Regional Overviews

Introduction

Asia

Australia and New Zealand

Commonwealth of Independent States

Europe

Latin America

Middle East and North Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa

United States and Canada

Country Summaries

Introduction

Afghanistan

Algeria

Azerbaijan

Bahrain

Belarus

China (including Hong Kong)

Cuba

Egypt

Ethiopia

India

Iran

Iraq

Israel

Jordan

Kazakhstan

Kyrgyzstan

Libya

Malaysia

Moldova

Morocco

Myanmar (Burma)

Nepal

North Korea

Oman

Pakistan

Saudi Arabia

Singapore

South Korea

Sudan

Syria

Tajikistan

Thailand

Tunisia

Ukraine

United Arab Emirates

Uzbekistan

Venezuela

Vietnam

Yemen

Zimbabwe

Contributors

Index

Foreword

The Internet is the operating system of global politics. Ideas, messages, news, information, and money ricochet around the world in minutes, crossing time zones and borders in real time. Charities, banks, corporations, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and terrorist organizations all use the Internet to do business, to organize, and to speed communications. Internet technology is implicated in almost everything done in world politics today.

But the Internet is not the free operating zone that its early proponents expected. Contrary to conventional wisdom, states have shown an increased willingness to intervene to control communication through the Internet. And they have done so with precision and effectiveness.

At the beginning of the decade, few were aware of the scale of the problem. Advocacy and rights organizations charged that a handful of countries were blocking access to Web sites, but they had little evidence to support their claims. Good empirical knowledge of the scope of the problem did not exist.

Four years ago, a group of scholars at the University of Toronto, Harvard, and Cambridge (Oxford joined later) came together to begin systematic research on patterns of Internet censorship and surveillance worldwide. At the time, the project seemed very ambitious. The researchers proposed to put together a combination of contextual political and legal research and technical interrogations of the Internet in the countries under investigation. It relied heavily on the work of partners working in the countries where governments were engaged in active censorship. The project was extraordinarily challenging; in almost every case, the research implied a direct threat to national security and put researchers personal safety at risk.

The project was ambitious in other ways as well. A transatlantic collaboration among four universities is difficult to manage at the best of times, but the ONI includes dozens of researchers and collaboration with nongovernmental, rights, and advocacy organizations all over the world. The project is also truly interdisciplinary. It involves sociologists, lawyers, international relations scholars, political scientists, and some of the worlds most skilled computer programmers.

From 2003 to 2006, the ONI collaboration paid handsome dividends. It has produced eleven major country reports, reports that revealed a startling trend. States were aggressively finding ways to filter and control access to information for citizens within their borders. The reports were detailed, supported by strong evidence that had an immediate impact on policy worldwide. The ONIs China report was delivered before two U.S. congressional committees and was featured in newspapers and on television around the world. The reports highlighted the embarrassing evidence that major U.S. corporations were implicated in Internet censorship practices. Once, the best and brightest of Silicon Valley were wiring the world; now, they were profiting from their collaboration with governments who were censoring and blocking websites. The ONIs dogged investigations called into question the conventional wisdom about the Internets open architecture.

The significance of the research that ONI has conducted goes beyond its analysis of Internet surveillance and censorship. It speaks to fundamental questions of world politics, its structure, its power relationships, and its new forms of global control and resistance. The essays in this volume engage with all these issues. The editors of Access Denied present not only detailed overviews of their country investigations, but several incisive chapters that probe the legal, theoretical, and political implications of the growth of Internet-content-filtering practices worldwide.

Access Denied tells us unmistakably that the Internet is one of the most importantand most contestedterrains of global politics. It is being fought over by states, civil society organizations, and corporations. The essays in this volume do a superb job of educating us about the new battlefield of global politics.

Janice Gross Stein
Director, Munk Centre for International Politics

Preface