OVER
the next decade, approximately five billion people will become
connected to the Internet. The biggest increases will be in societies
that, according to the human rights group Freedom House, are severely
censored: places where clicking on an objectionable article can get your
entire extended family thrown in prison, or worse.
The details aren’t pretty. In Russia,
the government has blocked tens of thousands of dissident sites; at
times, all WordPress blogs and Russian Wikipedia have been blocked. In
Vietnam, a new law called Decree 72 makes it illegal to digitally
distribute content that opposes the government, or even to share news
stories on social media. And in Pakistan, sites that were available only
two years ago — like Tumblr, Wikipedia and YouTube — are increasingly
replaced by unconvincing messages to “Surf Safely.”
The
mechanisms of repression are diverse. One is “deep packet inspection”
hardware, which allows authorities to track every unencrypted email
sent, website visited and blog post published. When objectionable
activities are detected, access to specific sites or services is blocked
or redirected. And if all else fails, the entire Internet can be slowed
for target users or communities.
In
other cases, like in Ukraine, sites are taken offline with
distributed-denial-of-service attacks, which overwhelm a server with
digital requests, or else the routing system of the national Internet
system is tampered with to make entire sites mysteriously unreachable.
Entire categories of content can be blocked or degraded en masse; in
Iran, we hear that all encrypted connections are periodically severed
and reset automatically.
How
common is each tactic? Reliable data can be scarce. Measuring patterns
of censorship brings its own risks: If you repeatedly check whether
“objectionable” content is being blocked, you risk becoming a target
yourself.
And
while the technologies of repression are a multibillion-dollar
industry, the tools to measure and assess digital repression get only a
few million dollars in government and private funding. Private and
academic centers like the Citizen Lab in Toronto are building detection
tools, but we are still in the early days of mapping the reach of
digital censorship.
Of
course, detection is just the first step in a counterattack against
censorship. The next step is providing tools to undermine sensors,
filters and throttles.
Again,
the groundwork is being laid. For years, a vibrant community of
engineers from San Francisco to Beijing have collaborated on
circumvention technologies to shield dissidents from surveillance. One
such tool, called Tor, has been used by tech-savvy dissidents around the world for over a decade.
Our
travels have taken us to North Korea, Saudi Arabia and other countries
grappling with repression. Yet when we meet dissidents and members of
harassed minorities, we are surprised by how few of them use systems
like Tor.
Trust
is perhaps the most fundamental issue. In Iran, online bazaars sell
services that promise secure access. Yet rumors swirl that these
services are covertly provided by the Iranian government, and can be
monitored or terminated at any time.
Scalability
is another problem. One popular approach, virtual private networks,
allow users in a repressively censored place like Syria to “proxy” the
connections through a computer in a more open place like Norway. But
when thousands of users connect to a single intermediary, the repressive
government notices, and shuts them down.
The
final challenge is usability. Engineers can build sophisticated
algorithms, but they’re useful only if a member of, say, the Kurdish
minority in Iran can figure out how to install them on her low-bandwidth
phone.
None
of these challenges are new. What is new is the possibility to overcome
them — if we make the right public and private investments. For
example, software using peer-to-peer algorithms lets users route an
Internet connection through another computer without having to go
through a V.P.N., helping to address the trust and scalability issues.
These
algorithms don’t resolve the trust issue completely. How do you know
you’re actually connecting to your friend, not a government agent? Ten
years ago, this challenge would have been a deal breaker for many
people. But today it’s possible to use networks like Facebook or Google
Hangouts to verify one another’s identities similarly to how we do
offline.
Obfuscation
techniques — when one thing is made to look like another — are also a
path forward. A digital tunnel from Iran to Norway can be disguised as
an ordinary Skype call. Deep packet inspection cannot distinguish such
traffic from genuine traffic, and the collateral damage of blocking all
traffic is often too high for a government to stomach.
Finally,
advances in user-experience design practices are a big, if not obvious,
boon. The Internet is becoming easier to use, and the same goes for
circumvention technologies — which means that activists will face less
of a challenge getting online securely.
Much
of the fight against censorship has been led by the activists of the
Internet freedom movement. We can join this open source community,
whether we are policy makers, corporations or individuals. Money, coding
skills or government grants can all make a difference.
Given
the energies and opportunities out there, it’s possible to end
repressive Internet censorship within a decade. If we want the next
generation of users to be free, we don’t see any other option.
Eric E. Schmidt, the
executive chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, the director of Google
Ideas, are the authors of “The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations,
Businesses and Our Lives.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/opinion/the-future-of-internet-freedom.html?hpw&rref=opinion&_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/opinion/the-future-of-internet-freedom.html?hpw&rref=opinion&_r=0
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