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

Tue Nov 30 07:59:05 PST 2010

Sarah,

Are you two the only State officials in DC working full time on
"Internet freedom" ? It would be interesting to know what resources
State is devoting to this. What, exactly, do you do, if you don't mind
my asking?

Best,

-C

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 3:08 PM, Labowitz, Sarah <LabowitzS at state.gov> wrote:
> 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-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
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