{"id":110325,"date":"2020-11-19T17:21:23","date_gmt":"2020-11-20T01:21:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/69.46.6.243\/?p=110325"},"modified":"2020-11-19T17:33:03","modified_gmt":"2020-11-20T01:33:03","slug":"research-shows-extremely-aggressive-internet-censorship-spreading-in-worlds-democracies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/?p=110325","title":{"rendered":"Research Shows \u2018Extremely Aggressive\u2019 Internet Censorship Spreading in World\u2019s Democracies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ann Arbor, MI…The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of what are considered the world\u2019s freest countries aren\u2019t safe from internet censorship.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Roya Ensafi, CSE Research Assistant Professor, uses her computing system, Censored Planet, in the Bob and Betty Beyster Building on September 10, 2018. The system continuously monitors internet censorship by utilizing public servers around the world to monitor and report when website access is blocked in specific countries. Photo: Joseph Xu\/Michigan Engineering, Communications & Marketing<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d said Roya Ensafi, U-M assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the development of the tool.<\/p>\n

Poland blocked human rights sites; India same-sex dating sites<\/p>\n

Ensafi\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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,\u201d she said. \u201cThe architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s already happening abroad, the researchers found.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we see from our study is that no country is completely free,\u201d said Ram Sundara Raman, U-M doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering and first author of the study. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing that many countries start with legislation that compels ISPs to block something that\u2019s obviously bad like child pornography or pirated content.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut once that blocking infrastructure is in place, governments can block any websites they choose, and it\u2019s a very opaque process. That\u2019s why censorship measurement is crucial, particularly continuous measurements that show trends over time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Norway, for example\u2014tied with Finland and Sweden as the world\u2019s freest country, according to Freedom House\u2014passed 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 \u201cextremely aggressive\u201d blocking across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like Match.com.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The researchers say the findings show the effectiveness of Censored Planet\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s data, and help activists make more informed decisions about where to focus.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very important for people who work on circumvention to know exactly what\u2019s being censored on which network and what method is being used,\u201d Ensafi said. \u201cThat\u2019s data that Censored Planet can provide, and tech experts can use it to devise circumventions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Censored Planet\u2019s constant, automated monitoring is a departure from traditional approaches that rely on volunteers to collect data manually from inside countries.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe imagine the internet as a global medium where anyone can access any resource, and it\u2019s supposed to make communication easier, especially across international borders,\u201d he said. \u201cWe find that if this continues, that won\u2019t be true anymore. We fear this could lead to a future where every country has a completely different view of the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study is titled \u201cCensored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ann Arbor, MI…The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of what are considered the world\u2019s freest countries aren\u2019t safe from internet censorship.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":110326,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_cbd_carousel_blocks":"[]","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,5,33,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-government","category-health-fitness","category-life-style","category-news","last_archivepost"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/how-russias-online-censorship-could-jeopardize-internet-freedom-worldwide-block-list-Roya-Ensafi.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/110326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}