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

Tue Nov 23 06:08:23 PST 2010

Hi all,

This seems like a good time to say hello-I work at the State Department
in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, leading our Internet
freedom work.  I've been on the list for a few weeks, along with
Katharine Kendrick, also on the Internet freedom team in DRL.  Thanks
for the thoughtful discussion on this topic and many others. Contact
info below.

Best,
Sarah

Sarah Labowitz

+1-202-632-2049

Labowitzs at state.gov

Katharine Kendrick

+1-202-632-2046

Kendrickka at state.gov

Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor

U.S. Department of State

www.state.gov/netfreedom 

From: liberationtech-bounces at lists.stanford.edu
[mailto:liberationtech-bounces at lists.stanford.edu] On Behalf Of Collin
Anderson
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2010 11:42 PM
To: liberationtech at mailman.stanford.edu
Subject: Re: [liberationtech] WSJ Op-Ed: No Quick Fixes for Internet
Freedom

Unfortunately, there's a disparity between the level of understanding of
those on this list and the foreign policy apparatus. I think it's easy
to miss that much of the operations of DC is based on a narrative. GIFC
can (and do) open up logs to the likes of NYT or WaPo and say, 'there is
freedom!' Whether or not DRL eats it up, Senators like McCain and
Lieberman do, and it's evident that there's a lot of downward pressure
in such matters. We've all seen that.

In the human rights world the only time harassment makes the front page
is when there's a body. A firewall is a tangible object that can be be
identified, linked to a state actor and fought -- cyber mobs with no
visible relationship to a regime? No so much. It's only when one can
make a compelling case that the arcane dangers of XSS or malware is an
existential threat to _freedom_ that Richard Cohen will write articles
for you. It also has to be neatly packaged (he's old).

I'm sure everyone is aware of this, and certainly Ms. MacKinnon's piece
has been the best step toward that, but I felt the discussion was
creeping away from the particular value of the OpEd, i.e. finding bodies
to get the money for security.

CDA

On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Evgeny Morozov
<evgeny.morozov at gmail.com> wrote:

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-ci
rcumvention/

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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