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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.
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.
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.
How is that voluntary? In most cases you can only slightly "choose" your ISP, and even then you simply have to get the least evil. Voluntary for the ISPs, but that is not voluntary for the end user, not in the least.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
None of the countries who censor the internet are ever portrayed as "free". Though the governments of those countries claim that they are free, even the media and the average Joe know that they are not free. On the the other hand, all the western civilizations try to claim that they are the most free nation on the face of the earth. Ever. And the mainstream media buys into that, all the while they are doing things that if they were taking place in another country would make that country seem more "non-free" by the media.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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?
How is that voluntary? In most cases you can only slightly "choose" your ISP, and even then you simply have to get the least evil. Voluntary for the ISPs, but that is not voluntary for the end user, not in the least.
In the UK, if you can get ADSL you can choose *any* ADSL provider. All the phone lines are owned by the ex-monopoly (BT), but BT are required to lease the line to any broadband provider the customer chooses.
At the moment, the ISPs that don't censor are the smaller ones, which tend to be slightly more expensive -- but also provide better customer service etc.
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.
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.
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.
"NEWARK, Ohio -- Central Ohio authorities have filed felony charges against a 15-year-old girl accused of taking nude cell phone photos of herself and sending them to high school classmates.
Police say the Newark Licking Valley student was arrested Friday and held over the weekend. On Monday, she entered denials to juvenile charges of illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material and possession of criminal tools.
A spokeswoman for the Ohio attorney general's office says an adult convicted of the child pornography charge would have to register as a sexual offender, but a judge would have flexibility on the matter with a convicted juvenile.
A prosecutor says Licking County authorities also considering charges for students who received the photos." (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,434645,00.html)
True, I don't know if she was convicted, but she was charged with a felony.
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