[liberationtech] WSJ Op-Ed: No Quick Fixes for Internet Freedom

Sun Nov 21 11:51:32 PST 2010

I'd like to chime in again: Ethan's analysis presumes that the State
Department actually *wants* to circumvent their way around censorship (i.e.
provide universal unfettered access to all of the Web to all users in China,
Iran, etc). I don't think that this is actually the case; if it is, I'd be
even more troubled. We can argue about the merits of this position and even
campaign for them to take this a more salient issue. But I don't think that
this is currently their policy objective any more than feeding every child
in Africa is their policy objective (or giving each kid a laptop...).Such
utopian visions are better left to poets, not governments. This s why John
Perry Barlow sounds far more persuasive on this issue than Hillary Clinton.

On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Katrin Verclas <katrin at mobileactive.org>wrote:

> I am with you, Roger, and with Ethan Zuckerman who wrote astutely:  We
> can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship.
>
>
> http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/02/22/internet-freedom-beyond-circumvention/
>
> Relevant paragraphs:
>
> "Let’s assume that systems like Tor, Psiphon and Freegate receive
> additional funding from the State Department. How much would it cost to
> provide proxy internet access for… well, China? China reports 384 million
> internet users, meaning we’re talking about running an ISP capable of
> serving more than 25 times as many users as the largest US ISP. According to
> CNNIC, China consumes 866,367 Mbps of international internet bandwidth. It’s
> hard to get estimates for what ISPs pay for bandwidth, though conventional
> wisdom suggests prices between $0.05 and $0.10 per gigabyte. Using $0.05 as
> a cost per gigabyte, the cost to serve the Internet to China would be
> $13,608,000 per month, $163.3 million a year in pure bandwidth charges, not
> counting the costs of proxy servers, routers, system administrators,
> customer service. Faced with a bill of that magnitude, the $45 million US
> senators are asking Clinton to spend quickly looks pretty paltry.
> There’s an additional complication – we’re not just talking about running
> an ISP – we’re talking about running an ISP that’s very likely to be abused
> by bad actors. Spammers, fraudsters and other internet criminals use proxy
> servers to conduct their activities, both to protect their identities and to
> avoid systems on free webmail providers, for instance, which prevent users
> from signing up for dozens of accounts by limiting an IP address to a
> certain number of signups in a limited time period. Wikipedia found that
> many users used open proxies to deface their system and now reserve the
> right to block proxy users from editing pages. Proxy operators have a tough
> balancing act – for their proxies to be useful, people need to be able to
> use them to access sites like Wikipedia or YouTube… but if people use those
> proxies to abuse those sites, the proxy will be blocked. As such, proxy
> operators can find themselves at war with their own users, trying to ban bad
> actors to keep the tool useful for the rest of the users.
>
> I’m skeptical that the US State Department can or wants to build or fund a
> free ISP that can be used by millions of simultaneous users, many of whom
> may be using it to commit clickfraud or send spam. I know – because I’ve
> talked with many of them – that the people who fund blocking-resistant
> internet proxies don’t think of what they’re doing in these terms. Instead,
> they assume that proxies are used by users only in special circumstances, to
> access blocked content. "
>
> Katrin
>
>
>
>
> On Nov 21, 2010, at 2:16 PM, Roger Dingledine wrote:
>
>  On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 03:44:03PM -0800, Mehdi Yahyanejad wrote:
>>
>>> Most of the public justification for the Internet Freedom funding has
>>> been the specific cases of Iran and China (read congressional hearings
>>> on these issues). It makes sense to ask about the effectiveness of
>>> the funding in Iran and China. GIFC tools have been pretty successful
>>> in Iran so far.
>>>
>> [snip]
>>
>>> Having a broader strategy for "Internet freedom" and listing priorities
>>> is needed but those other priorities are not as well-defined as the
>>> technical problems. A good thing about technical problems is that with a
>>> good mix of money and engineers, you can generate some results.
>>>
>>
>> One of the topics that I think is often overlooked in these discussions
>> is the question of sustainability.
>>
>> I had a good chat this summer with one of the Freegate developers, who
>> was complaining that $1.5M would only pay for a trivial fraction of the
>> bandwidth they need. I was trying to convince him that he should put
>> the money toward work that would continue to be useful in the longer
>> term. After all, if you blow $1.5M for three months of bandwidth, what
>> are you left with afterwards?
>>
>> Is the end goal to "deliver" as many youtube views to China as possible,
>> as soon as possible? That's a mighty roundabout way to tear down this
>> wall. Now, I think number of users who can circumvent is probably a good
>> measure of something, and I agree that Freegate and Ultrasurf have been
>> doing a good job of increasing the number of users who can circumvent. But
>> any senator who's thinking "we just need to push more youtube videos into
>> China" is in for some disappointment. The reality is much more complex --
>> it has to do with stronger social networks inside these countries, and
>> giving people tools to let them change the atmosphere from within their
>> country in the ways they see fit, and with making sure the tools can
>> provide enough safety for their users. That last point could lead into
>> a fine discussion about metrics and how you should define "successful",
>> but my big question here is whether three months of increased bandwidth
>> is the best way for them to spend their money.
>>
>> In my world, bandwidth is free. There's some initial cost of building
>> relationships and convincing people that your cause is worth giving
>> bandwidth to, but once you've done that, the incremental cost of another
>> month is in maintaining those relationships. There's the Tor approach of
>> getting lots of smaller providers to donate bandwidth (inefficient, but
>> useful for distributing trust over multiple places if you want to avoid
>> attractive centralized targets). But if you're just trying to maximize
>> bandwidth for effort, go to Google and AT&T and whoever and ask to use
>> one of their spare gigabit links for a while. Falun Gong has a lot of
>> volunteers; surely some of them have connections in organizations who
>> can be convinced to help save the world? Even when they can't get "free",
>> getting bandwidth at-cost or subsidized would still be better.
>>
>> Then the majority of the funding can be used for results that are more
>> sustainable, that is, will have an impact in future years too -- software
>> engineering so the tools are easier to maintain and adapt, increased
>> developer clue about adversary capabilities and how to play the arms
>> race, better tool usability and community education about how/why to
>> circumvent and what risks to consider, etc.
>>
>> Now, here's where it gets controversial (well, more controversial, insofar
>> as I think they have no plans to take my above suggestion). Why keep
>> these results secret? The Freegate developers should be asking themselves
>> whether sharing some of the lessons they've learned would ultimately
>> help them achieve their goals better. Their current answer is "no way,
>> that would help the censors," and my current answer is "the more people
>> you bring up to speed on this topic, the more help you're going to get;
>> don't you think the censors are already paying attention?" In a sense,
>> this is the "open source vs proprietary" debate yet again. Fine. But the
>> *funders* should be asking themselves a similar question: is funding
>> a few individuals to privately get better at circumvention the best
>> progress we can make to put the world in the position we want to be for
>> the future? Or said a different way, are we really at the stage of the
>> arms race where every necessary strategy is well-understood, and it's
>> just a matter of "deploy it more and bigger and then we'll win"?
>>
>> There's definitely a role for diversity of solutions here -- I think
>> it's good that Freegate and Ultrasurf are getting more funding. Also,
>> not every funder needs to have the priority of increasing the community's
>> knowledge with the long term in mind. Maybe it makes sense for State
>> to leave the research and development efforts to other funders like
>> DARPA and NSF, and then State's strategy can be "figure out what your
>> priorities are, then take the best known option at the time for achieving
>> those priorities and deploy the heck out of it." But people on all sides
>> of the question need to think about their goals, what they expect their
>> actions to achieve, and what they're giving up (now and in the future)
>> by the sustainability strategies they choose.
>>
>> --Roger
>>
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>
>
> Katrin Verclas
> MobileActive.org
> katrin at mobileactive.org
>
> skype/twitter: katrinskaya
> (347) 281-7191
>
> A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact
> http://mobileactive.org
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>
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