[liberationtech] Even the world’s freest countries aren’t safe from internet censorship

[Yosem Companys]

The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled
shows that even citizens of what are considered the world’s freest
countries aren’t safe from internet censorship.

The University of Michigan team used its own Censored Planet tool, an
automated censorship tracking system launched in 2018, to collect more than
21 billion measurements over 20 months in 221 countries. They recently
presented a paper on the findings at the 2020 ACM Conference on Computer
and Communications Security.

“We hope that the continued publication of Censored Planet data will enable
researchers to continuously monitor the deployment of network interference
technologies, track policy changes in censoring nations, and better
understand the targets of interference,” said Roya Ensafi, U-M assistant
professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the
development of the tool.
Poland blocked human rights sites; India same-sex dating sites

Ensafi’s team found that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries
studied, including unexpected places like Norway, Japan, Italy, India,
Israel and Poland. These countries, the team notes, are rated some of the
world’s freest by Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy
and human rights. They were among nine countries where Censored Planet
found significant, previously undetected censorship events between August
2018 and April 2020. They also found previously undetected events in
Cameroon, Ecuador and Sudan.

While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by
individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the
study did not uncover widespread censorship. However, Ensafi points out
that the groundwork for that has been put in place here.

“When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an
environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for
ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic,” she said. “The
architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all
be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.”

It’s already happening abroad, the researchers found.

“What we see from our study is that no country is completely free,” said
Ram Sundara Raman, U-M doctoral candidate in computer science and
engineering and first author of the study. “We’re seeing that many
countries start with legislation that compels ISPs to block something
that’s obviously bad like child pornography or pirated content.

“But once that blocking infrastructure is in place, governments can block
any websites they choose, and it’s a very opaque process. That’s why
censorship measurement is crucial, particularly continuous measurements
that show trends over time.”

Norway, for example—tied with Finland and Sweden as the world’s freest
country, according to Freedom House—passed laws requiring ISPs to block
some gambling and pornography content beginning in early 2018. Censored
Planet, however, uncovered that ISPs in Norway are imposing what the study
calls “extremely aggressive” blocking across a broader range of content,
including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating
sites like Match.com.

Similar tactics show up in other countries, often in the wake of large
political events, social unrest or new laws. News sites like The Washington
Post and The Wall Street Journal, for example, were aggressively blocked in
Japan when Osaka hosted the G20 international economic summit in June 2019.
News, human rights and government sites saw a censorship spike in Poland
after protests in July 2019, and same-sex dating sites were aggressively
blocked in India after the country repealed laws against gay sex in
September 2018.

The researchers say the findings show the effectiveness of Censored
Planet’s approach, which turns public internet servers into automated
sentries that can monitor and report when access to websites is being
blocked. Running continuously, it takes billions of automated measurements
and then uses a series of tools and filters to analyze the data and tease
out trends.

The study also makes public technical details about the workings of
Censored Planet that Raman says will make it easier for other researchers
to draw insights from the project’s data, and help activists make more
informed decisions about where to focus.

“It’s very important for people who work on circumvention to know exactly
what’s being censored on which network and what method is being used,”
Ensafi said. “That’s data that Censored Planet can provide, and tech
experts can use it to devise circumventions.”

Censored Planet’s constant, automated monitoring is a departure from
traditional approaches that rely on volunteers to collect data manually
from inside countries.

Manual monitoring can be dangerous, as volunteers may face reprisals from
governments. Its limited scope also means that efforts are often focused on
countries already known for censorship, enabling nations that are perceived
as freer to fly under the radar. While censorship efforts generally start
small, Raman says they could have big implications in a world that is
increasingly dependent on the internet for essential communication needs.

“We imagine the internet as a global medium where anyone can access any
resource, and it’s supposed to make communication easier, especially across
international borders,” he said. “We find that if this continues, that
won’t be true anymore. We fear this could lead to a future where every
country has a completely different view of the internet.”

The study is titled “Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal
Censorship Observatory.” The research team also included former U-M
computer science and engineering student Prerana Shenoy and Katharina
Kohls, an assistant professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen,
Netherlands. The research was supported in part by the U.S. National
Science Foundation, Award CNS-1755841.

https://news.umich.edu/extremely-aggressive-internet-censorship-spreads-in-the-worlds-democracies/
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