CyberLaw Blog
A news resource for CyberLaw and Cyber-Rights issues from around the globe
Aid Urged for Groups Fighting Internet Censors
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010Aid Urged for Groups Fighting Internet Censors: “Five United States senators want the government to move ahead with plans to provide $45 million to help people in other countries evade Web restrictions.”
Mod chip seller infringed copyright in game elements, even if not in whole game
Friday, November 20th, 2009Mod chip seller infringed copyright in game elements, even if not in whole game: “A man who sold computer chips that enabled pirated video games to be played on consoles was rightly convicted of copyright offences, the Court of Appeal has ruled.”
(Via OUT-LAW News.)
U.S. tests system to break foreign Web censorship
Friday, August 14th, 2009U.S. tests system to break foreign Web censorship | U.S. | Reuters
Thu Aug 13, 2009 7:09pm EDT
By Jim Finkle
BOSTON (Reuters) – The U.S. government is covertly testing technology in China and Iran that lets residents break through screens set up by their governments to limit access to news on the Internet.
The ‘feed over email’ (FOE) system delivers news, podcasts and data via technology that evades web-screening protocols of restrictive regimes, said Ken Berman, head of IT at the U.S. government’s Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is testing the system.
The news feeds are sent through email accounts including those operated by Google Inc, Microsoft Corp’s Hotmail and Yahoo Inc.
‘We have people testing it in China and Iran,’ said Berman, whose agency runs Voice of America. He provided few details on the new system, which is in the early stages of testing. He said some secrecy was important to avoid detection by the two governments.
The Internet has become a powerful tool for citizens in countries where governments regularly censor news media, enabling them to learn about and react to major social and political events.
Young Iranians used social networking services Facebook and Twitter as well as mobile phones to coordinate protests and report on demonstrations in the wake of the country’s disputed presidential election in June.
In May, ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the Chinese government blocked access to Twitter and Hotmail.
Sho Ho, who helped develop FOE, said in an email that the system could be tweaked easily to work on most types of mobile phones.
The U.S. government also offers a free service that allows overseas users to access virtually any site on the Internet, including those opposing the United States.
‘We don’t make any political statement about what people visit,’ Berman said. ‘We are trying to impart the value: ‘The more you know, the better.’ People can look for themselves.’
In addition to China and Iran, targets for the FOE technology include Myanmar, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam, he said.
Berman, however, said there would be modest filtering of pornography on the system. ‘There is a limit to how much (U.S.) taxpayers should have to pay for,’ he said.
(Reporting by Jim Finkle, editing by Matthew Bigg and Paul Simao)
The Associated Press: Iran activists work to elude crackdown on Internet
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009The Associated Press: Iran activists work to elude crackdown on Internet: “Iran activists work to elude crackdown on Internet
By REBECCA SANTANA (AP) – 3 days ago
CAIRO — The tweets still fly and the videos hit YouTube whenever protesters take to the streets in Iran — even as the Internet battle there turns more grueling.
Authorities appear to be intensifying their campaign to block Web sites and chase down the opposition online, and the activists search for new ways to elude them.
Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube remain blocked, as they have been since Iran’s political turmoil began following the disputed June 12 presidential election. Internet experts believe the government is going further — including tracking down computers from which images and videos of Iran’s protests are sent out to the rest of the world. Activists fear their every move online is watched.
‘We are really worried about this. To protect myself, I just limit my posts on social networks, my tweets and also I deleted some parts of my personal blogs and my other notes on the Web,’ one Iranian who regularly sends tweets about the election turmoil said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
Another said, ‘Every site where people can gather and stay connected and share news and pics … is blocked.’ Both agreed to e-mail interviews on condition of anonymity, fearing government retaliation.
The government is believed to have been aggressively developing software and technology in recent years to strengthen its filtering and monitoring of Web sites. Since the election, a number of Internet experts are countering by providing Iranians with improved proxy systems and other programs to get around government blocks and escape detection.
‘I think the Iranian government is learning quickly how to control and contain these things,’ said Andrew Lewman, executive director of The Tor Project Inc., based in Boston.
His group’s free downloadable Tor program allows Internet users to work through a network of relays run by volunteers around the world to access blocked sites and hide what they are doing on the Internet. Active sessions using Tor in Iran have jumped from a few hundred before the election to thousands after, the nonprofit group said.
The Internet has been a key tool for Iran’s opposition on two fronts. One is internal — to organize protests and exchange information. The other is external — to let the world know what is going on amid severe government restrictions that bar foreign media from reporting and taking pictures and video on the streets. The government has been actively trying to block online activists on both fronts.
Hundreds of thousands of Iranians held protests denouncing the election as fraudulent until security forces launched a heavy crackdown, arresting hundreds and killing at least 20 protesters. Throughout, activists took to the online messaging site Twitter to relay 140-character posts about what they were seeing and hearing. They furtively recorded video of police and members of the feared Basij militia riding on motorcycles through throngs of protesters, or photos of demonstrators bleeding from battles with government authorities.
One video in particular gripped Iran and the world: Images of 27-year-old Neda Agha Soltan bleeding to death after being shot on a Tehran street were viewed millions of times on YouTube, and her death became a rallying cry for opponents of the regime.
Even after the crackdown crushed the large protests, the Internet has remained key. In two smaller protests organized in recent weeks, constant tweets reported on where the demonstrators were gathering. Despite the restrictions, videos quickly emerged on YouTube showing thousands of protesters clashing with police and Basij. At the same time, Internet news sites have become vital for tracking arrests of opposition politicians and activists, who are often picked up from their homes far from scenes of protests.
During the height of the protests, authorities cut off cell phone service and text messaging — which are all run by state-run firms and through government-owned towers — to break up communications for organizing rallies. Phone service has returned, though it cuts off in parts of Tehran when authorities believe a protest will be held. Texting has been slower to come back and is sporadic at best.
The government has also tried a more traditional route to subdue dissent: arrests. At least 34 journalists and bloggers were detained after the election, joining seven others already in prison, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Around a quarter of Iran’s 65 million people are believed to have Internet access. Iran has long used filtering to restrict certain news and political or pornographic Web sites. But since the election, the number of blocked sites has increased.
Besides Twitter and YouTube, the BBC’s Farsi-language news site is still blocked, and Web sites associated with opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi — who says he won the election — are constantly shut down. In the last week, two new Mousavi sites have been created after others were targeted.
The day after the election, Internet traffic in and out of Iran came to a near total stop, according to research done by Arbor Networks, a Chelmsford, Mass.-based Internet security company.
The cause is not known, but the group says one explanation could be that the state-run Internet company all but shut down the network so all traffic could be run through filtering programs, which can only handle limited volume. In the week after the election — the latest figures available — traffic picked up again to about 70 percent of normal. In Iran, the Internet remains slow because of the brakes on traffic.
Given the secrecy with which the Iranian government operates, it’s difficult to assess exactly what it is doing to monitor the Internet. A number of groups have sprung up to offer Iranians their online expertise, including on called NedaNet, in honor of the woman who died.
Morgan Sennhauser, a project coordinator for NedaNet, published a 31-page paper detailing the strategies and tactics the government is believed to be using.
The methods include blocking data from going to or from certain Internet Protocol addresses — the numeric identifiers for every computer connected to the Web. Another technique used, called packet fingerprinting, allows the government to judge certain characteristics of a packet of data to decide whether to block it or not, so that, for example, a firm’s international transactions can go through but pictures of a protest cannot.
NedaNet, which describes itself as a group of independent ‘computer hackers and computer users,’ aims to set up proxy servers and other technology to enable Iranian users to make themselves anonymous and escape detection. Another proxy system that Iranians often use is Freegate, which was first developed by Chinese dissidents to get around Beijing’s heavy Internet censorship.
‘I do think that we’re going to continue to counteract just about everything they can come up with, it’s just a matter of time,’ Sennhauser said in e-mailed comments to the AP.
Gaurav Mishra, CEO of the social media research and strategy company 20:20 WebTech, said Twitter and Facebook do help get news out of Iran, but he warned against exaggerating their power to enact change.
‘At best, these tools are catalysts, which are very important roles, but should not be overrated,’ he said. ‘To expect Twitter and Facebook on their own to make a fundamental change in that situation is expecting too much.’
There is one method of communication that the government has been unable to stop. Every evening since the election, Iranians climb to their rooftops and scream ‘Allahu akbar,’ — ‘God is great’ — a protest tactic used during the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
On the Net:
* http://www.torproject.org
* http://www.nedanet.org”
Deutsche Welle: Internet proxies let Iranians and others connect to blocked Web sites
Friday, June 19th, 2009New media tools like Twitter have helped organize protests from Georgia to Guatemala and, now, Iran. Experts say regimes can block access to such sites, but proxy technology helps keep lines of communication open.
With independent media blocked from reporting on recent demonstrations in Iran after Friday’s election, many people around the world turned to the micro-blog service Twitter for a detailed account of events in Tehran and other Iranian cities.
But if the Iranian government so chose, it could attempt to cut off Iranians’ direct access to Twitter and other social media services to prevent the spread of information, according to Yaman Akdeniz, director of the UK-based Cyber-Rights.org.
“Undemocratic countries like Iran rely on crude blocking and filtering mechanisms to limit their citizen’s usage of the Internet temporarily, or indefinitely,” he said. “The true extent of the Internet censorship attempts in Iran remains to be seen.”
Tehran blocked the popular networking site Facebook for two days before the elections and only restored access after a massive public outcry. Since the elections, authorities have attempted to deny access to several pro-opposition Web sites and news portals likely to challenge current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s announced victory, according to the media rights group Reporters Without Borders.
Anonymous Web surfing
There are, however, technical ways for Iranians – and others living under repressive regimes that filter the Internet – to access all the material on the World Wide Web, according to Akdeniz.
“However hard the governments try, total censorship and control will not be achieved on the Internet,” he added. “Going back to the topic, the Iranians will find ways and means of accessing the Internet, regardless of their government’s crude attempt to control the free flow of information.”
Computers outside the country filtering the Web can be set up as so-called proxy servers, which pass along information from one Internet connection to another like an anonymous virtual messenger whose presence doesn’t tip off security authorities.
Reporters Without Borders has for years encouraged cyber-dissidents to make use of such proxy services, including the popular program Tor, which passes data through a random series of three computers before it arrives at its destination.
Mirroring Internet traffic
The program, which builds a network of currently about 2,000 volunteers who act as online go-betweens, allows, for example, an Iranian to see otherwise blocked sites by encrypting and routing his request through a series of three random computers with access to the entire Web, then sending the data they acquire back through the same anonymous network, explains Andrew Lewman, the executive director of the Tor Project.
“Someone watching the Internet would not be able to track who you are and where you are going,” he said, adding that the number of Tor connections from Iran has doubled since last week’s election, moving the nation up the Tor user list from near the bottom 50 to within the top 15 of the some 500,000 people using Tor each day,
More people using the network, regardless of their location or what they’re doing on the Web, makes Tor more effective at making the Internet anonymous, Lewman said, adding that the service is simple to install and wouldn’t work if only activists and dissidents used the program.
“The more normal people who turn on a connection on their home computer the better, because then it looks more and more like the general Internet,” he said. “If Tor becomes an activists’ network and anyone watching would say, ‘That’s an activist network connection; we should watch that.’”
Proxy critics remain
Despite the protection proxy services offer those living under oppressive governments, the system does have some detractors. Critics say the network can be taken advantage of by terrorists and other criminals. That’s an argument Lewman said isn’t as persuasive as it may seem.
“Criminals have far better anonymity and privacy than most likely anyone in the world,” he said. “If you’re already willing to break the law, then you can do far more private things. If you steal a person’s identity on the Internet you’ll have more anonymity than any tool can provide.”
While Tor and other tools can help Web users get around the blocks and filters governments put on the Internet, they should not be seen as the final answer in the fight to stop online censorship, according to Akdeniz.
“Circumvention technologies provide only a partial solution to the problem of Internet censorship,” he said. “Unless there is a process towards democratization and openness, censorship will be the norm.”
Author: Sean Sinico
Editor: Susan Houlton
Iranians find ways to bypass Net censors
Thursday, June 18th, 2009Iranians find ways to bypass Net censors: “
A new generation of Iranians has found ways to bypass the country’s notoriously censorial Internet restrictions and disseminate details about Iran’s internal turmoil in the wake of the recent election.
In technical circles, at least, Iran is well-known for erecting one of the world’s most restrictive Internet …
“
(Via The Iconoclast.)
