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The Coming Censorship Wars
KentuckyFC writes "Many countries censor internet traffic using techniques such as blocking IP addresses, filtering traffic with certain URLs in the data packets and prefix hijacking. Others allow wiretapping of international traffic with few if any legal safeguards. There are growing fears that these practices could trigger a major international incident should international
traffic routed through these countries fall victim, whether deliberately or by accident (witness the prefix hijacking of YouTube in Pakistan last year). So how to avoid these places? A group of computer scientists investigating this problem say it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to determine which countries traffic might pass through. But their initial assessment indicates that the countries with the most pervasive censorship policies — China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia — pose a minimal threat because so little international traffic passes their way. The researchers instead point the finger at western countries that have active censorship policies and carry large amounts of international traffic. They highlight the roles of the two biggest carriers: Great Britain, which actively censors internet traffic, and the US, which allows warrantless wiretapping of international traffic (abstract)."
Eventually the internet will treat the USA as damage and route around it.
A society that uses Censorship must have something or someone to hide.
I love life, live life to love.
Who will win ?
these [censored] wars have.
In few years the Internet as we knew it will become a Frankennet made of closed bubbles that will talk each other only through heavily filtered pipes. Every nation will spy on its own citizen and impose filters to limit or stop connectivity when necessary.
Freedom of communication is simply a too dangerous weapon to be left in the hands of common people.
AFAIK, this process already started a few years ago.
No doubt... Wiretapping is easier to beat that censorship as well. Encryption is fast, easy, and totally controlled by each end. Proxies relay on trust of a third party. But if you have trust, why is wiretapping such a problem? :)
Any country with an active sigint program is snooping international internet traffic coming through their pipes. After all, that is the job of an intelligence agency. Only questions are to what degree and sophistication. Oh, and here's a list of countries with SIGINT programme.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGINT_by_Alliances,_Nations_and_Industries
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I'm not sure who we are talking about. Who is it that needs to avoid countries actively censoring?
Considering the countries actively censoring or monitoring I'm aware of are: USA, UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Austria, Australia, China, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. I'm sure there also many more.
Are we talking about Latvia trying to route to Luxembourg here? Who?
Surely... The sane thing to do is to actually stand up and stop governments censoring and monitoring, rather than talk about some small country re-routing to another. Look at the list above, that's probably 75% of the internet there (I'm guessing that figure).
Re-routing is a sin of commission. Lets actually fix the fucking problem, rather than step over it. Our Governments do not represent us any more. Get them out of office. Make your voices heard, while you still actually have them.
Or are you just going to sit there and take it? The time to act is now, not soon, nor when it gets really bad.
I was under the impression that Great Britain does not censor the internet. ISPs operating within it can, and several do, choose to sign up to a voluntary scheme (which includes ISPs on the board).
Regardless, to my (limited) knowledge filtering is done by blocking certain addresses to the consumer, nothing that would hit through-traffic.
As for snooping, wherever your traffic is passing through, either you have good encryption or someone can look in. Perhaps with varying degrees of (il)legality, as if that matters much.
OK, the source & destination IP will be known by the "bad guys", but everything else is encrypted. The old excuse of "it takes too much CPU" was valid...back in the 1990s, but no longer.
C'mon people! HTTPS *everywhere*!
They highlight the roles of the two biggest carriers: Great Britain, which actively censors internet traffic, and the US, which allows warrantless wiretapping of international traffic
Wire tapping isn't censorship last I checked. Censorship requires active suppression. Perhaps wiretapping may cause self censorship because one could think that they shouldn't say something?
That being said - the fact that traffic is monitored should be a given. Thus the raison detre for encryption. Anyone that worked in the ISP world in the early 90's will know that several of their upstream providers had rogue sniffers on their network. Why do you think telnet died and SSH came to be?
My reaction - use encryption as often as possible, assume everything is "wiretapped". Fight unwarranted active suppression wherever you find it. (FYI - I often black hole IP's that I see scan my network. I guess I'm censoring it ;)
-cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
There will always be one ISP that does not monitor it's traffic. Why? Because that's where the business will lie once all the other ISPs have monitoring equipment in place (even if it is imposed upon by the government). Not to say this will be in the U.S., but there will always be that one country. And on top of this, who is to say that encryption techniques won't make this argument obsolete anyway? If monitoring does break out on a wide scale, I see many, many websites turning towards things such as IPSEC or HTTPS. Darknets will be thrown up and proxies from that one country that doesn't monitor its ISPs will spring up like weeds. The internet is on a global scale, and as such we've had the freedom as an international privilege for far too long to let it go now. Someone or something can try to bring down the internet, but I just don't see it happening.
"The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec^2" -Marcus Dolengo
I love how the countries with really harsh cencorship laws and actual history of censoring the internet are glazed over as not being a threat while the West is once again painted as the big bad guy.
Are they really this predictable?
Will they ever stop blaming us for everything and making us out to be an Evil Empire responsible for all injustice in the world?
you can setup encryption that's so strong they don't have a hope in hell of breaking it, and even if they started going after proxy providers (remmeber their in another country) it's a cat and mouse game they just can't win - you can change your proxy with a few key strokes.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Every government watches communications and Internet traffic. It's their job. But it doesn't constitute censorship if it just watches instead of filters or even modifies the content.
If these piss-ant dictators and foaming moralists won't leave well enough alone, we'll just have to encrypt (TOR) the lot of it.
I am really serious. If we don't start using encrypted traffic
routinely and by default on the Internet soon, then doing so
will without doubt be made illegal.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The pirates -- they have proxies in Canada, and their own galleon-based communications network.
There are growing fears that these practices could trigger a major international incident
Just wait until the print newspapers are gone. When the only source of news is via the internet...
Not about the censorship, that is an issue if you live in a country that does it, but the monitoring? I mean really, do you assume your traffic is private? If so that's a really bad idea. I've always assumed that my traffic going over the net could be watched. Governments aren't the only people who could watch you. For example at work, we have a packet sniffer to help diagnose problems. Usually it sits idle watching nothing. However we can watch any traffic we like, and can do so invisibly. If I want I can mirror a port and watch everything someone does.
So you should always operate under the assumption that your traffic could be watched. Your ISP, another ISP, your government, another government, a crafty hacker, etc all could watch what you are doing. That means that if what you are doing needs to be kept secret, encrypt that shit. Don't send passwords. credit card numbers, etc in clear text. Use things like SSH/SSL for important stuff. Heck use them for non important stuff too if you like, it isn't as though encryption hits modern computers that hard these days.
Point is I don't see why as an individual you'd worry if a foreign country is monitoring your traffic. They could just be one of many. I can see concern if your government is monitoring your traffic, and especially if they are censoring your traffic, but in general, assume shit you do on the Internet is watched.
The American Public and the FCC need to keep an eye on ISPs. Comcast has been censoring conservative message board posters in my opinion. Because dominant ISP Comcast is a gateway to the internet, they control many eyeballs. Comcast's systematic censoring of conservative opinions on their News & Current Events message boards needs to cease and desist. If Comcast gets tax breaks from local government, then they have a civic, ethical, moral and perhaps legal obligation to provide fair and balanced moderation of their message boards. This type of social engineering is an outrage. Please get involved. Silence is consent. Post a conservative response to a News or Current Events thread here and see for yourself.
http://community.comcast.net/comcastportal/board?board.id=news
This is America...Not CHINA
Just say that 100 more times and it will make sense.
[This Comment Was Deletey By The Slashdot Censorship Moderation Panel]
In the end, anyone with an IP address can act as a host or relay. If something wants to get through, it will.
There was an advantage to the uucp forwarding network, in that routing could be managed and the number of possible paths was immense. Anyone with a basic PC and a modem could install Waffle and become a uucp node. For two years when the wall was still up, I had an ongoing conversation with a mathematician/cryptographer in Minsk (no Tom Lear jokes, please). I was always concerned that the Soviets would find him out, but he never shared my concern. Messages between us usually took more than twenty hops, one of which was a diskette hand-carried between East and West Berlin.
A little-known fact is that the fall of the Soviet Union was in part coordinated via email carried on uucp and fidoNet. Mainly this was because these networks ran "below the radar", from one phone to another and could change their locations at will. There also was an advantage in these networks' use of Zmodem for exchange. Zmodem's error correction, rate adjustment and pig-headed retry made sure the message got through in spite of the really poor state of Soviet phone service.
The Internet's biggest weakness right now is that most of the traffic ends up on a small number of backbones. The only thing standing between the current tree-structured internet and a true network is incentive. Censorship would probably stimulate a change in topology.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
This article points to one very real problem with censorship. Once one party assumes the right to censor then all parties, everywhere assume the same privilege. The simple fact is that any censorship, no matter how seemingly innocent, is an attack upon the freedom of all people in all nations.
... most terrorists are average people having little to no specialized skills, they aren't a professional architect, ...
You shouldn't make that assumption or use it in anti-censorship arguments. In fact a non-trivial number of the planners in terrorist organizations ARE such experts.
Osama, for instance, is/was a civil engineer and owner/operator of a major civil engineering firm. Not only is he such an expert but he had many more working for him aboveground and thus plenty of potential recruits for underground work.
It's pretty clear that the attack on the Twin Towers was well designed to take the building down, probably by experts working with the building plans: The building had a failure mode that could be exploited by heat (weakening the floor structures, which braced the supporting walls against buckling, so the floors would drop away and leave the walls unbraced) and the planes were fully fueled and banked just before impact so their fuel would be deposited on several consecutive floors.
Planners in terrorist organizations don't necessarily ever end up on the operations. Thus they aren't expended and a few of them can plan many attacks.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> I don't think that it's possible to sue a stack of cash, no matter how big it is.
Actually it is. I picked the first example I could find from a little Googling, but here's the docket for the United States of America v. Thirty Thousand Dollars ($30,000.00) In United States Currency for your reading pleasure.
I also found this news article about how this works in another case, which is more than a little disturbing. You're simply not allowed to have too much cash these days. They think it proves you're doing something illegal. Even if they're right most of the time, I think it's terrible what they can do to the innocent.
When your conversations are monitored most people self-censor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Who says, "I'm gonna encrpyt...Im gonna use Tor...I'm gonna use Freenet...." Bla bla bla...
My pair of wire cutters here says you're gonna use carrier pidgin....You're gonna use smoke signals...You sure ain't gonna use no internet.
What?
Before the internet the only way you could have a voice that told a story to a large amount of people was to publish it, which cost a LOT of money and had a gatekeeper (editor) to decide if it was suitable. If your story was exposing corruption within a corporation and that corporation sponsored that publishing house, you have zero chance of it getting published. Publishing is not just the cost of printing, but the distribution network to get it to a large number of widely spread out locations. You could print the story yourself which would cost a small fortune, then drive around delivering it yourself which would cost another small fortune in fuel bills. Then your next problem is how to recoup your money. That's just the print industry. TV and radio are even tighter controlled and much more expensive to break into.
The point is that before the internet the elite had control over the gatekeepers; the gatekeepers can now be bypassed by anyone with access to the internet.
Even when PC's were still very expensive and programs were still complicated, knowledge like how to put up a website was seen as having skills beyond the normal user, internet censorship wasn't really an issue. From there grew some things that weren't illegal at the time but gradually became illegal like publishing child porn. The only reason these types of things weren't illegal in the first place is that when the laws were written they didn't foresee this "internet thingy" and had to be amended to take it into account.
As PC's get cheaper and easier to use, as services pop up that make it easier and easier, not to mention cheaper or even free for average non-technical users to set up some web presence. Throw a stick and you find plenty of examples from MySpace, Facebook, WordPress etc. This means that all those voices who had knowledge of some wrongdoing now have a voice and are increasingly willing to use it. It means that everyone willing to try and scam someone from a safe distance now has a way to do it. It means that everyone with an agenda (good, bad or just sad) now has a way to organize and recruit.
As people spend more and more time with online services which they are interacting WITH other people instead of being a target being sprayed with adverts from corporations in the hopes of leeching some cash for shit they didn't really need. Not only does that take their time and loyalty away from the traditional media companies, it also exposes them to different stories than they see in the mainstream, or different versions of the same stories. That's not to say everything they see / hear / read online is true, but then again that is also true of the mainstream media corporations who they previously DID believe to be true......before the internet made them skeptical.
Without this free access to publishing online, sites like wikileaks would never have gotten than knowledge to the masses. By "the masses" we're not just talking one country, we're talking "the whole planet". Well the whole planet who have not censored them. Without the internet that knowledge would never come out, and the corporations involved would continue to get away with murder because they control the gatekeepers of the knowledge. Any who step out of line have work addresses which can be visited by some "re-educators" with baseball bats. The internet has changed all of that, it's no surprise that the elite are scrambling around trying to silence stuff, they have a LOT of skeletons in their closets which would seriously damage their liberty, money or their reputation which they've carefully managed over the years by controlling the gatekeepers. In short, they have lost control, internet censorship is the only response they have to regaining that control.
http://www.torproject.org/
Yes, of course. Don't concern yourself with China or the middle eastern theocracies. Sit in your basement and fret about the US, as you have been.
Post a link to any charge - any conviction - in any US jurisdiction - based on such evidence.
Hmm, folks here have been saying a lot about wiretapping, and defeating it with encryption. Then they forward HTTPS and TOR as brilliant solutions.
Of course, HTTPS only protects one protocol, and TOR puts you at the whims of the exit node, which may well be government controlled and can not only monitor, but even alter your traffic..
So what is the REAL solution to it all? *drumroll*
IPv6
Why? Because the IPv6 standard REQUIRES built in IPsec support at the network layer. So, once you've got people finally migrating to IPv6, you can be assured that EVERY host you communicate with is capable of automagically encrypting the connection, for ANY protocol!
By itself that still leaves it obvious which IP's you are communicating with, but by then a dash of onion routing would be all you'd need.
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That is why there is such a great demand for vpn and web proxy services from these countries.
Such as alwaysvpn.com or proxy.org
"The building had a failure mode that could be exploited by heat (weakening the floor structures, which braced the supporting walls against buckling, so the floors would drop away and leave the walls unbraced) and the planes were fully fueled and banked just before impact so their fuel would be deposited on several consecutive floors.
Dood, you are soooo right...of course those terrorists were super-geniuses with the world's most superior intelligence network - or how else could they have planned and fully utilized those six, or is it now seven, military and civilian exercises, taking place at the SAME EXACT TIME FRAME, which all appeared to have originated from either DOD (Rumsfeld) or the Office of the VP (Cheney)???
I especially appreciated that exercise involving the evacuation of the NRO so that the geostationary satellite observing the mid-Atlantic east coast area couldn't be tasked on the NYC World Trade Center attack site (would have involved human operator tasking direction). And forward positioning 98% of American fighter-interceptors to Alaska, Northern Canada and Greenland....who could have ever foreseen......
Gee whiz, those terrorists think of everying......
What would a Chinese dissident do if their comminication about corruption or human rights abuses could be tracked back to him because the US were tapping the communication?
Would he feel safe enough to talk?
No.
http://www.wpxi.com/news/18469160/detail.html#-
Crap. The other link is dead. Stupid internet. I'll never understand why news organizations take the news down. It doesn't stop being news -- ever. Suffice to say -- many other examples of this exist. That was just me searching my delicious account. If you search google, you'll find more. So take your skepticism elsewhere. You're wasting peoples' time trying to deny reality. Thank you drive through.
Actually, here's a google search to more: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sexting+charged+possession&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Jose Padilla didn't even get to meet his lawyers for TWO years. He is an American Citizen, and what was done to him can be done to anybody. The executive has asserted their power. All they have to do is say you did something. Even if you didn't. (Note that they dropped all the original "dirty bomb" charges against him. They could just as easily say YOU were planning a dirty bomb.)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
What a fucking idiot, Quantos. This has been going on for DECADES, so stop spewing your bullshit propaganda. That's how civil asset forfeiture works. Read this and learn something, dumbshit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture#Asset_forfeiture_in_the_United_States. And I quote: "In civil forfeiture cases, the US Government sues the item of property, not the person". You want some other examples? HERE. Or maybe you could google it yourself instead of spewing mis-informative bullshit propaganda? Take your head out of the fucking sand!
At least you know we're the top incinerator. I give you props for that much, at least.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
You are censored! Blacklisted!
Innocent, eh? Aren't they all?