Internet Freedom

At NDI, we believe that free access to information is a human right. The Internet has dramatically enhanced our ability to exercise this right, but unfortunately most humans cannot access the Internet. Today, over 4.3 billion people cannot connect to the Internet at all and another roughly 1 billion people have their Internet connections censored or monitored. Equitable access to information can be a powerful democratizing force, but when only 20% of humans have truly free access to digital information, that potential is diminished.

That is why our team supports the creation of Humanity’s Public Library, an initiative by Outernet. Outernet broadcasts a data signal from satellites that is free to receive anywhere on Earth. While this is not an Internet connection, it is a free stream of critical information. What information is considered “critical?” You decide.

Outernet and Creative Commons are co-hosting the first edit-a-thon for Humanity’s Public Library on July 18-19 2015 to decide what is included in this library. Anyone on Earth is encouraged to participate - details on how to have your voice heard in this process can be found at http://editathon.outernet.is.

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Last week I took a Friday trip to the Knight Conference Center at the Newseum for a day focused on the present state of digital security as it relates to surveillance and the news media. The Freedom of the Press Foundation, Open Technology Institute, and Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press co-hosted the “News Organizations and Digital Security: Solutions to Surveillance Post-Snowden” event, which drew a capacity crowd of technologists, journalists, media development professionals, and a few folks like me who work in the #Tech4dem space.

The star of the event turned out to be none other than Mr. Edward Snowden himself. After the conclusion of the day’s final panel - fittingly a discussion on “Security Lessons from the Snowden Files” - Snowden appeared for a brief Google Hangout with the audience. Like many of the panelists before him, Snowden called for a “change in attitudes towards digital security.” The (in)famous whistleblower stressed the importance, as he did during the initial release of the NSA documents, for a wider social and policy discussion on issues of digital security, surveillance, and potential regulation. After he wrapped up, the crowd took a trip to E Street Cinema for a screening of CitizenFour, a recently released documentary film tracking Snowden during the days leading up to and the months following the NSA leaks.

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There’s something about being presented with a challenge that inspires people to be innovative. Perhaps that’s why an organization like USAID launched its Grand Challenges for Development initiative, which is rooted in the fundamental belief that engaging the world in the quest for solutions is critical to instigating breakthrough progress using science and technology. The World Bank’s Apps for Development initiative is another instance where an organization leveraged a competition to bring together the best ideas from software developers and development practitioners to create innovative applications; in fact, we've been writing about these app challenges for years. 

Of course, when a cash prize is attached to propositions like these, imaginations are bound to go wild, as evidenced by the winners of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge competition, which were announced last month. Working in partnership with the Ford Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, the Knight Foundation launched their challenge initiative in February of this year, where the posed the question: How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation? to which they received 704 responses. While the 19 winners (to whom a total of $3.4 million dollars was awarded) all focused on themes related to Internet access, transparency and safety, the solutions they offered were varied. READ MORE »

Internet and mobile technology have become a part of everyday life for most around the world. As smartphone access to the internet expands it’s no surprise then that the number of mobile apps on the market has also grown rapidly in recent years, reaching close to 1 million that can be downloaded on both iPhone and Android devices. One of the most interesting new ones is Open Garden’s FireChat app, which aims to make the Internet more reliable by bypassing existing networks and internet service providers. Since its launch in March, the app has gained two new users per second and several thousands of installs a day. Here’s why.

Micha Benoliel, the CEO and cofounder of the startup Open Garden, developed the FireChat app to allow all devices, including smart phones, tablets and laptops to work together to create a mesh network through which to access the Internet at any time. Now for many, the term mesh network may be new, but the general concept is one that most of us are familiar with. This is how it works.

In the absence of an outside Internet connection, the Open Garden takes advantage of two features commonly found in cell phones today: Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Much like a bicycle wheel, where multiple spokes connect to a central hub, a mesh network allows multiple devices to connect to a single Internet connection. Each device on the network functions like a hotspot, allowing other devices within a range of 100 feet to connect to it and gain Internet access. What this means is that messages can be passed between devices connected to the mesh network without each device having to establish its own Internet connection. The advantage of this decentralized network is that users can keep their conversations concealed from prying eyes and surf the Internet under the raider. The disadvantage however is that users are not able to send messages to specific people because communications sent on the mesh network are visible to everyone connected to it. READ MORE »

The White House has released the findings of the Big Data and Privacy Working Group Review, a 90-day study commissioned in January from the Obama Administration to examine how big data will transform the way we live and work and alter the relationships between government, citizens, businesses, and consumers.

Big data analysis has tremendous potential for those wanting to understand large trends in public sentiment and behavior. At NDI, we make use of Crimson Hexagon, a tool which analyzes vast amounts of social media data to understand sentiment and prevalence of particular topics. Through our work with the Open Government Partnership, we also encourage governments to make data more open and available for public use.

Yet, as the report notes, “Big data technologies, together with the sensors that ride on the “Internet of Things,” pierce many spaces that were previously private.” This desire to protect privacy rights address a range of concerns reflecting different types of intrusion into a person’s sense of self, each requiring different protections. READ MORE »

I’m recently back from Toronto attending CyberDialogue 2014, an extraordinary gathering hosted by the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs, particularly their extraordinary CitizenLab. It's a heck of a group they pulled together - about 150 people from across academia, the NGO world, security geeks and government.
The topic for the meeting: “After Snowden, Whither Internet Freedom?”

From NDI's perspective, one of our greatest worries could be framed by dropping the H from whither: "After Snowden, will Internet Freedom Wither?”

Since Secretary Clinton put Internet Freedom on the policy agenda back in 2010, the US State Department has poured millions of dollars into promoting an open internet through funding technology to keep activists safe online and discussing the notion for a unified Internet with open access for all.

This has been a very important conversation within the United States government as well as in the world of human rights. Before the State Department Internet Freedom push, the entire discussion of rights online was framed around cyber-hyphen whatever - with language of security and control. Protect the online space by stripping away anonymity, maximizing monitoring, and generally empowering governments - including those of regimes not well known for vibrant democracy or rule of law. Rather than a monologue controlled by the Pentagon and NSA, the introduction of Internet Freedom as a frame shifted the internal conversations into a debate - and as a result, NGOs working for human rights advocates and democratic organizers had a place at the table. READ MORE »

Greetings, fellow Autocrats and Internet Oppressors!

The rapid pace in which information can spread in this internet era makes activities by some hard to hide. This is bad news for the corrupt or repressive. Organizations like NDI support a free and open internet as part of a democratic society, and civil society is getting better at sharing the information you'd want no one to know. 

You didn’t want people to talk about the bribes they’re forced to pay? NICE TRY. Thought citizens wouldn’t want news about ongoing protests? NOPE.

So if you’re a leader or a legislator that’s fed up with all this “transparency” and “good governance” nonsense, keep on reading! We’ll give you tips and tricks to make you wrestle back control of telecommunication to keep any criticisms and free expression at bay: READ MORE »

“The system uses SRP for mutual authentication and for generating session keys that ensure Perfect Forward Secrecy. All traffic between devices is encrypted with AES-128 in counter mode, using a unique session key. 

 

The secret is a randomly generated 20-byte key. It is Base32-encoded in order to be readable by humans. BitTorrent Sync uses /dev/random (Mac, Linux) and the Crypto API (Windows) in order to produce a completely random string. This authentication approach is significantly stronger than a login/password combination used by other services.“

The past several months have seen protest movements take place in Ukraine and Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as in many other places around the world. As these movements have arisen it has been an ongoing question as to whether it was possible to utlize the Internet to determine the scale and scope of these movements. Both countries experienced some form of protest movement that resulted in on the ground action in their respective capitals. Is it possible to identify how successful a protest movement is just by looking at the publicly available online flow of information? When trying to assess the importance of technology in a democracy there are dozens of questions that need answering.  This hints at the broader processes of understanding how technology and society interact. Furthermore, it allows us to grasp in real terms how citizens of a country are using technology to discuss, mobilize and engage around political issues in a way other than formal polling.

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Ukraine are very different in many respects. Although both have ethnic divisions the depth of these ethnic divisions, at least on the surface, appears to be significantly different. BiH has approximately 65% Internet penetration while Ukraine has just under 40% penetration. Ukraine has 3.2 million active users of Facebook while BiH has 1.54 million. Ukraine has approximately 10 times as many people as BiH and covers a significantly larger geographic area. Both sets of protests achieved international media attention, but if we look behind the sheen of the international media and we examine what people in the country were talking about can derive we a non-scientific assessment of the scale of these two different movements? READ MORE »

I just returned from the International Studies Association conference in Toronto, Canada where thousands of scholars from around the world gathered to discuss virtually every topic imaginable related to international affairs. I presented two papers on two separate panels. Below is a topline summary of one paper and its substantive findings and relevant criticism from a panel of experts. This paper will be published in the academic journal “Democracy and Security” in a forthcoming edition. 

Are national security issues in cyberspace were spurring states to “arm” themselves with cyber tools, capabilities, and laws to combat one another? And if states are arming themselves what does this mean for human and democracy rights activists with substantially fewer resources than nation states? 

With a limited sample I built a case for the existence of a security dilemma in cyberspace and then attempted to establish a correlation between increases in cyber capabilities, tools and legal and regulatory developments to the oppression of state actors. What might you ask is the security dilemma? The definition of the security dilemma comes from Robert Jervis who states: “many of the means by which a state tries to increase its security decrease the security of others.” The security dilemma is the central thesis of realist international politics as outlined by Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, John Mearsheimer, and others. To survive, states must establish and maintain their relative power positions in the context of other states. Figure 1 & 2 below illustrate the security dilemma as it is developed in cyberspace.  READ MORE »

Late yesterday, Brazil’s House of Representatives passed the Marco Civil, a bill aimed at guaranteeing civil rights in the use of the Internet in Brazil. Specifically, it aims to protect privacy rights, net neutrality, safeharbors for internet service providers and online service providers, open government, and setting forth that access to the internet is a requisite to the exercise for civic rights.

The drafting of the Civil Marco Internet in Brazil began in 2009 through a collaborative effort between the Office of Legislative Affairs of the Ministry of Justice, in partnership with the School of Law of the Rio de Janeiro at the Getulio Vargas. Citizen feedback on this bill (between November 2009 and June 2010) was received through social media by more than 2000 contributions of internet users across the country. (More here about the process). READ MORE »

Turkey blocked Twitter. If you happen to have been on vacation over the weekend or haven’t had a chance to check out the newspaper in a few days, The Washington Post and Reuters both have good write ups on the potential political fallout of this Twitter block as well as some background information on the situation. The interesting thing, as noted in the Washington Post article, is that this “restriction” has had little effect on Twitter chatter within the country. In fact, in the aftermath of discovering that they were no longer able to access Twitter, tweets spiked to 138 percent of the normal posting rate, an ironic feat in light of the ban. This statistic begs the question, “How are Turks tweeting, and tweeting rapidly, and about a Twitter ban?”

Well, the answer is simple and not so simple. Turkey has faced routine website blocking for the better part of the last decade, most notably the 2008 restriction of access to Youtube (which was in effect for 2 years). By now, most Turks, especially the younger generation, are well acquainted with the various measures for circumventing such restrictions. In case you are not, here are a few of the ways to access Twitter in the event of a block.

1. SMS

On March 20th, Twitter sent out a tweet instructing Turks how they could tweet via SMS on both Vodafone and Turkcell networks. SMS tweets are popular in areas with limited access to internet data, but in this case the service is proving to be multi-functional. Users can also receive tweets from friends that the user designates they would like to receive mobile tweets from. Obviously Twitter via SMS lacks much of the user experience of the broader Twitter app and website, but it still proves to be an effective work around.

Is true mobile phone security a lost cause? With the increasing popularity of mobile messaging applications with weak security practices, the escalation of sim card registration requirements, and the nearly antiquated legal definitions of the ways that mobile phones are used by citizens, securing mobile phone communications is a multi-faceted problem.

I’ve done mobile security trainings for a number of years now. And one of the biggest challenges that emerges with thinking through mobile security is all of the different areas where threats can emerge: the technical infrastructure of GSM networks, the personal information that’s needed to obtain a sim card, the location tracking capabilities of phones, and the list goes on.

During RightsCon, I had the opportunity to chat with the following rockstars about the current state of mobile security and what can be done to make improvements:

Alix Dunn, Creative Lead at The Engine Room  

Bryan Nunez, Technology Manager at The Guardian Project

Carly Nyst, Legal Director at Privacy International

Chris Tuckwood of The Sentinel Project

Craig Vachon, VP Corporate Development at Anchor Free

Pablo Arcuri, Chief of Party at Internews

Oktavía Jónsdóttir, Program Director at IREX

Rory Byrne, Founder and CEO at Security First

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There is no shortage of news about Turkey in the press recently. Between Gezi park protests last summer, and a currently unfolding corruption case, Turkish democracy is a hot topic. Last week Freedom House released a special report on Turkey entitled “Democracy in Crisis: Corruption, Media, and Power in Turkey” with the central finding being that, “Turkey’s government is improperly using its leverage over media to limit public debate about government actions and punish journalists and media owners who dispute government claims, deepening the country’s political and social polarization.” READ MORE »

Last week, many of China’s major websites were inaccessible for nearly 24 hours to Chinese internet users. Chinese users trying to reach a range of websites ending in .com were re-routed instead to an IP address owned by Dynamic Internet Technology, which is the provider of the circumvention tool Freegate. DIT has been closely affiliated with the Falun Gong, a religious organization banned in China.

GreatFire.org, which examines Chinese censorship, has a detailed report investigating this outage, illuminating that all attempts within China to visit popular websites such as Sina Weibo, Baidu, etc. would be incorrectly re-routed to 65.49.2.178 (an IP address in Wyoming).

While state news agency Xinhua raised the possibility of hacking, and CNNIC attributed the breakdown to a "root server for top-level domain names", others blame the breakdown on a failure of the Great Firewall. As Chinese internet censorship expert Xiao Qiang states to Reuters, "It all points to the Great Firewall, because that's where it can simultaneously influence DNS resolutions of all the different networks (in China). But how that happened or why that happened we're not sure. It's definitely not the Great Firewall's normal behavior."

Proper implementation of a DNS to match the domain name and the IP address of a website or web service is critical to ensuring that the Internet functions properly. As GreatFire points out, DNS poisoning, or hijacking of DNS routing to send a visitor to an incorrect domain name or IP address, is a technique deployed by the Great Firewall to render ‘blacklist’ websites inaccessible. READ MORE »

China leads the way when it comes to controlling online content. A push to counteract messaging that differs from “official” interpretation of events has spurred a wave of crackdowns that started in August, publically justified by the government as preventing the spread of online "rumors”.

Authorities have escalated their campaign against "cybercrime,” designed to prevent “hearsay” and “gossip” from spreading rapidly online, culminating in the arrests of hundreds of activists.

Prominent activist Murong Xuecun in a NYT op-ed stated that, “the vast state censorship apparatus works hard to keep us down. But posts race through Weibo so quickly that it’s difficult to control them with technology. Hence, the government is resorting to detainment.”

Chinese authorities utilize a number of methods for exorcising “bad” speech in its online communities. For over a decade, the government has been employing a task force to publish regime-friendly comments online in an effort to manipulate public opinion.  This force has become known as the 50 Cent Army, which pays homage to the rumored 50 cents of Renminbi paid per comment (though in a rare moment of transparency, the government budgets have listed “Internet opinion analysts” as official occupations, most notable at the China Employment Training Technical Instruction Center). In 2012, real name registration came into effect -- requiring web users to register their given name and national identification name with provider sites before posting comments.

The “campaign against cybercrime” has reached new heights in targeting those “perpetrate rumours” in China’s online communities. This provision has paved the way for mass arrests of outspoken netizens across the country, including the Big V’s-- microbloggers known for online activism. An August 24th editorial stated that popular bloggers who “poison the online environment” should be “dealt with like rats scurrying across the street that everyone wants to kill.”

Arrests have also spread amongst China’s Uighur population.  July and August were marked by a government movement against “religious extremist content on the internet” in the Xinjiang province.  Fearing a militant, religious uprising, police arrested 139 people for spreading “jihadist” sentiments and posting religious content online, according to state-run media.

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The revelations about sustained and pervasive NSA surveillance that started in June and are still ongoing are having a sustained effect on the global conversation about censorship and surveillance on the Internet. Using 'big data' analysis of public sentiment we can illustrate the change in this conversation. The increase in online posts on the topic important because it indicates that the global conflict over Internet norms is occurring in real-time and is not fading out of the global consciousness or being consumed by a Huxleyan dystopia. If anything, the conversation has increased and has remained significantly higher than it was in the months prior to the first wave of revelations.

Our analysis, using Crimson Hexagon's media monitoring platform, comprised more than 2.5 million online posts from April 6 until October 1 from almost every country in the world. The conversation was and remains dominated by the expected players (largely due to an English language bias or our survey), United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.  Even though we conducted our survey for English language posts only, the global geographic location of posts accounts for nearly all nations around the world. READ MORE »

NDItech was recently at an event on Our Digital Future: Ideas for Internet Research hosted by The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. A diverse panel of experts in the field were invited to the discussion: Matthew Reisman, a Senior Manager at Microsoft, Milton Mueller, Professor at the Syracuse University of Information Studies, Brian Bieron, Senior director with eBay, and Carolina Rossini who serves as Project Director for the Latin American Resource Center.

Panelists made a number of interesting observations about the status and power of the internet in today’s global society. Matthew Reisman pointed out that Microsoft, in particular, is interested in studies of how government regulatory policies are affecting the ability of entrepreneurs to conduct business online - which would be most easily measured by conducting econometric research on internet policies enacted around the world.  As trade and services burgeon online, governments are creating barriers that complicate the ease of doing international business. It is important for those researching the modern impact of the internet to consider just how these barriers are affecting businesses, economies, and people, especially in a world where eCommerce has grown to encompass over 6 percent of the global retail sector over a period of ten years. Milton Mueller further asserted that developing an understanding of intimate relations between technology and social relations is essential, including how [we] are going to govern newly implemented technologies, and what the global impact of this governance will be.

The internet is global and as such has particular impact on the economic possibilities for developing countries. We hope to see tangible data from conversations such as this that makes the point wht the internet - in economic and political terms - is a vital resource for countries worldwide.

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Early this summer, the Wall Street Journal published a widely-circulated article on the increasing restrictions to free speech online. South East Asia continues to be a region where internet freedom is under threat.

The most notable case is in Vietnam, where the draconian Decree 72 has been implemented. (More details on other restrictions in Vietnam can be found here). According to the decree, “[A] personal information webpage is a webpage created by individual on their own or via a social network. This page should be used to provide and exchange information of that individual only; it does not represent other individual or organization, and is not allowed to provide compiled information.” This law has severe implications for any journalists, academics, and others who seek to share work accomplished by others. In addition, the decree requires all foreign websites to include at least one server in Vietnam, so that the data stored on those servers can be accessed by local authorities. READ MORE »

Cyberspace and all communications associated with the Internet was once idealized as a free and open space in which communications could flow back and forth at liberty. This idea has slowly changed in the last 25 years and we are now seeing the Internet and cyberspace as a “Fierce Domain” in which states engage in hostile actions against one another and increasingly against their own citizens. We wondered what normative changes have occurred over the last 15 years in cyberspace and what the implications of this change has been on democrats around the world. 

Internet freedom has been under threat in Vietnam for some time. The most recent action to repress free speech online is in the form of “Decree 72”, a legislation which requires Internet companies to cooperate with the Vietnamese government to enforce prohibition of: opposing the " the Socialist Republic of Vietnam," undermining "the grand unity of the people", damaging 'the prestige of organizations and the honour and dignity of individuals”, and other ambiguously worded means to express oneself online.

This decree also applies to “organization/individuals inside and outside Vietnam, directly/indirectly involved in managing/providing Internet services and information, and online games, ensuring information safety.” The decree was adopted on July 15th of this year, and will come into force on September 1st. The decree has largely been condemned by human rights organizations and internet industry operating in Vietnam. READ MORE »

While news of NSA and GCHQ surveillance continues to dominate the news, there are plenty of other countries that use legal and judicial means to justify online censorship and surveillance. Internet freedom is backsliding in these countries:  READ MORE »

The recent revelations about large-scale NSA surveillance point to a pervasive problem facing democracy and human rights activists around the world. They face intense surveillance on a daily basis for working for universally accepted human rights and democratic and accountable governance. Those who thought of the internet as a space for free expression and a place where ideas are able to transit the globe unencumbered by now have realized that the reality of the Internet is not too dissimilar from that of the physical world. The great public square that is the internet is closely watched and increasingly controlled by governments and their spies.  We wonder increasingly: How can democracy and human rights activists still use this space to continue the good fight? What are the implications for democracy and human rights activists following the revelations of surveillance programs such as Prism and large-scale meta data dragnets?  Are we becoming fast the cyberlosers as the world is moving towards compromised internet governance, national internets, and pervasive surveillance? 

The bottom line is this: The online public square is depply compromised. Of course, this surely is not a great surprise.  READ MORE »

Elections and other political events can be a time in less transparent environments when there is increased internet monitoring and censorship. With notable elections coming up in the next few months, particularly in countries with a history of internet monitoring and filtering, utilizing circumvention technologies ahead of these events become extremely important. Circumvention technologies enable you to route your internet connection to an IP address outside of your country, allowing you to view otherwise filtered content. One of the best circumvention technologies is Tor. 

However, in countries such as Iran and China, known Tor IP addresses (or "relays") had been intermittently blocked in the past, making it unusable. Expanded use of capabilities such as Deep Packet Inspection have even made it possible for some regimes to determine if internet traffic is being routed through Tor.  READ MORE »

The minds at Citizen Lab are at it again: detailing how surveillance software developed by Gamma International is being implemented by countries around the world to target the work of pro-democracy groups

We preciously reviewed their report on Blue Coat, a U.S.-based company whose firewall and web filtering products have ended up in Syria, Burma, and other countries with a history of internet surveillance and censorship. READ MORE »