News n Notes from the Web

Governments using filters to censor Internet, survey finds
By Doreen Carvajal - Friday, May 18, 2007 - International Herald Tribune

PARIS: With the aid of sophisticated software, government censorship of the Internet is spreading into a global phenomenon, with tech-savvy governments filtering forbidden themes from politics and human rights to sexuality and religion, according to a new academic survey of 40 countries.

In the past five years, the practice has grown beyond a handful of countries, including Iran, China and Saudi Arabia, to 26 nations that block a wide range of topics as they adopt filtering techniques, according to an OpenNet Initiative report to be issued Friday in Oxford, England. "It's an alarming increase," said Ron Deibert, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, one of four universities participating in the yearlong study along with Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. "Once the tools are in place, authorities realize that the Internet can be controlled. There used to be a myth that the Internet was immune to regulation. Now governments are realizing it's actually the opposite."

Instead of blocking static Web sites, governments are focusing on entire Internet-based applications like YouTube, Skype and Google Maps, according to the report. They also are adopting furtive, just-in-time filtering to knock out the Web sites of political opposition groups during critical election periods, Deibert said.
About 100 researchers studied thousands of Web sites and discovered 200,000 examples of Internet filtering. Most of the countries evaluated in the study filtered out a wide set of themes, suggesting that once nations adopt blocking tools, they expand their range.

Countries like China, Iran, Syria, Tunisia, Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Oman and Pakistan followed a broad approach, accord to the report. Tunisia, which was host to a United Nations summit on the information society in 2005, focused on four themes: human rights, political opposition to the government, pornography and "anonymizer" sites that offer tools to circumvent controls online. But there are territorial differences. Vietnam and Uzbekistan tend to focus mostly on local content while largely ignoring international Web sites. Middle Eastern countries pay more attention to international news, with Iran blocking the BBC's site. Saudi Arabia focuses on censoring social content like pornography and gambling, though it also restricts political sites critical of the Saudi monarchy or non-Sunni Islam sites.

"This balance mirrors the use of commercial software, generally developed in the West, to identify and block Internet content," according to the study. One of the more popular software tools is SmartFilter, a product of Secure Computing in San Jose, California, which is used by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Sudan and Tunisia. In Tunisia's case, researchers found that when they tried forbidden sites, a page that looked like an Internet Explorer browser default page was displayed to disguise that censorship was taking place. The report also found that some countries pursued only specific approaches or exerted little control over the online universe. South Korea filters only North Korean sites, many of them originating in Japan. Jordan, Morocco and Singapore were also sparing, filtering just a handful of sites.

Researchers discovered no evidence of filtering in more than a dozen of the surveyed countries, among them Russia, Venezuela, Egypt, Hong Kong, Israel and Iraq. The United States and much of Europe were not studied in the survey because in those countries, filtering is focused primarily on copyright infringement issues and is generally pursued in the private sector. In contrast, according to the report, Internet censors in the 40 countries surveyed did not filter in connection with intellectual property rights. The research was funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in Chicago. In Iraq, researchers limited their testing to the civilian networks and did not include the network run by the U.S. military.

Earlier this week, officials with the U.S. Department of Defense announced plans to block a dozen Web sites. The military grid includes more than five million computers, which are now barred from sites like YouTube, MySpace and two popular Internet radio sites, Pandora.com and Live365.com. The U.S. authorities said they had taken the step as a pre-emptive measure to prevent the sites from clogging the networks, although they said that had not happened yet.
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Estonia says cyber-assault may involve the Kremlin
The Associated Press - Thursday, May 17, 2007

TALLINN: The Estonian defense minister, Jaak Aaviksoo, said Thursday that there was a possibility that the Russian government was involved in recent hacker attacks against Estonian Web sites.

Aaviksoo said there was not enough evidence to prove "a governmental role, but it indicates a possibility." He said more than one million computers worldwide had been used in recent weeks to attack Estonian Web sites since the removal of a disputed Soviet statue from downtown Tallinn, the Estonian capital. Officials said that Russian-language instructions on how to cripple Estonian Web sites were circulating on the Internet at the same time that Estonia fell victim to massive cyberattacks that some officials compared to an act of war. Earlier, the Estonian government had said that some of the attacks could be traced to computers in the Kremlin.

"If let's say an airport or bank or state infrastructure is attacked by a missile it's clear war, but if the same result is done by computers, then what do you call it?" said a Defense Ministry spokesman, Madis Mikko. "Is it a state of war? Those questions must be addressed." The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, of which Estonia is a member, sent a cybercrime expert to Estonia to help fight the electronic attacks amid concern that the military alliance might also be targeted, an official from the Brussels-based organization said Thursday.

Estonian Web sites, including those of some ministries, have been exposed to attacks as relations between the small Baltic nation and Russia have plunged to a new low. Mikko said instructions in Russian had been spread on the Internet on how to jam Estonian sites with denial-of-service attacks, in which hackers overload a single network by directing massive traffic to the site. He said at least one suspect had been arrested in Estonia in connection with the attacks.

When Estonia first pointed the finger at Russia on May 1, a Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, dismissed the accusations, saying the attackers must have used a fake Kremlin IP address to tarnish Russian authorities. An IP, or Internet Protocol address, is a number that devices use to identify and communicate with each other on a network. They are often referred to as the computing equivalent of a street address or phone number. Estonian officials said Thursday it was not clear whether the cyberattacks had originated in Russian government offices, or whether those computers had been hijacked by hackers elsewhere. "But that's also bad because it shows that the Russian computers are not protected enough," Mikko said.

The attacks started after the April 27 removal of the Bronze Soldier, which commemorates Red Army soldiers who were killed fighting the Nazis, but which many Estonians consider a bitter reminder of five decades of Soviet rule. Estonia's decision to move the statue from a downtown Tallinn square to a cemetery outside the city center provoked violent protest from ethnic Russians living in Estonia and from nationalist Russians in Moscow.
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