18 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
Freedom House released a report last week offering a kind of product review of internet circumvention tools available to web users living in countries where their access to online content is regularly blocked and filtered.
Circumvention tools — or at least the idea of them — have become a popular cause for politicians and some net freedom activists in the West who see the technology as the best antidote to internet firewalls.
But as Freedom House points out, the array of tools available come with tradeoffs many users may not be considering. Freedom House’s survey of users in Azerbaijan, Burma, China and Iran, reveals that many are prioritising quick access over personal safety and security — something they may be doing, the authors speculate, “out of ignorance of the risks taken.”
And in a further sign of the fractured debate around such tools — and the high stakes for anyone in, say, Iran trying to use them — a prominent US developer behind one of the tools examined by Freedom House has heavily criticised the report.
Jacob Appelbaum, one of the developers behind the Tor Project (perhaps even better known as a player in the US government’s Twitter confrontation over access to the personal information of users connected to WikiLeaks), has written that the report “in its current form could be dangerous to the users it aims to help.”
He critiques Freedom House’s methodology for examining the tools, including Tor’s, and suggests in particular that the report may mislead users on the security level of various circumvention options available to them.
For all their seeming popularity in concept — a theme discussed in the current Index magazine in Danny O’Brien’s profile of the imploded project Haystack — circumvention tools may not even be reaching many of their intended users.
Last year, a Berkman Center circumvention usage report estimated that no more than 3 per cent of internet users in countries with substantial internet censorship use circumvention tools at all. After surveying savvy net users most likely to know about such tools, Berkman concluded that the true usage rate is likely even lower.
These debates about the quality of existing tools and the extent of their actual impact matter for US internet policy for one significant reason: The State Department must decide how to deploy about $25 m in funding to support international Internet freedom, and some — including powerful Republican Senator Richard Lugar — would like to see that money go entirely to develop circumvention tools.
Rebecca MacKinnon, in an interview with the New Yorker magazine, describes what’s become a political fight in Washington over how to spend this money. It pits, on one side, circumvention tool developers like the Global Internet Freedom Consortium that have actively lobbied media and politicians, and on the other Internet advocates (MacKinnon included) who warn that circumvention tools only address a small piece of the problem of free speech censorship online.
Hillary Clinton seemed to place herself in the latter category during her February speech on internet freedom when she said the government would invest in a “portfolio of technologies, tools and training.”
The bigger question, though, may not be which technologies and which tools, but can the US best help the global cause of internet freedom by investing in technology tools, or human infrastructure?
As Ethan Zuckerman has argued: “We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship.”
10 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted, 240-179, along largely partisan lines to strip the Federal Communications Commission of any authority to regulate net neutrality. The vote has been viewed as mostly symbolic — the Democratic-controlled Senate is unlikely to pass the bill as well, and if it does, President Barack Obama has hinted he would veto it.
But the vote bodes poorly for net neutrality supporters who expected the concept to be enshrined in government regulation by now, more than two years into the Obama era. Those supporters, many of whom have gathered this weekend in Boston for the National Conference for Media Reform, have been deeply disappointed by Obama’s tepid advocacy and the weak net neutrality rules his hand-picked FCC chairman presided over last December.
Now as the political momentum in Washington seems to be headed even farther in the wrong direction — net neutrality represents a dangerous “government takeover of the internet,” its opponents have successfully claimed in the capital — US advocates are trying to ramp up their argument that the wonky, hard-to-grasp technological concept in fact represents the most important free speech issue of our time.
Senator Al Franken started using that phrase in December, and it has been a popular refrain in Boston this weekend as well.
If strong net neutrality rules fail to pass, telecommunications companies and internet service providers could block certain content on the internet, or prioritise content according to who pays the most money.
For free expression advocates, the threat requires thinking about censorship in an entirely different way. Without net neutrality, internet content could potentially be blocked not by the government, but by corporations (with the acquiescence of government institutions that won’t regulate them). And content could be blocked, slowed or prioritised not for religious, political, or ideological reasons, but for business ones.
“It’s not politically motivated, but it could have political effects,” said Aparna Sridhar, policy counsel for Free Press, hinting at what could happen if telecommunications companies carry only the content of individuals and organisations who can afford to pay for it.
10 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted, 240-179, along largely partisan lines to strip the Federal Communications Commission of any authority to regulate net neutrality. The vote has been viewed as mostly symbolic — the Democratic-controlled Senate is unlikely to pass the bill as well, and if it does, President Barack Obama has hinted he would veto it.
But the vote bodes poorly for net neutrality supporters who expected the concept to be enshrined in government regulation by now, more than two years into the Obama era. Those supporters, many of whom have gathered this weekend in Boston for the National Conference for Media Reform, have been deeply disappointed by Obama’s tepid advocacy and the weak net neutrality rules his hand-picked FCC chairman presided over last December.
Now as the political momentum in Washington seems to be headed even farther in the wrong direction — net neutrality represents a dangerous “government takeover of the internet,” its opponents have successfully claimed in the capital — US advocates are trying to ramp up their argument that the wonky, hard-to-grasp technological concept in fact represents the most important free speech issue of our time.
Senator Al Franken started using that phrase in December, and it has been a popular refrain in Boston this weekend as well.
If strong net neutrality rules fail to pass, telecommunications companies and internet service providers could block certain content on the internet, or prioritise content according to who pays the most money.
For free expression advocates, the threat requires thinking about censorship in an entirely different way. Without net neutrality, internet content could potentially be blocked not by the government, but by corporations (with the acquiescence of government institutions that won’t regulate them). And content could be blocked, slowed or prioritised not for religious, political, or ideological reasons, but for business ones.
“It’s not politically motivated, but it could have political effects,” said Aparna Sridhar, policy counsel for Free Press, hinting at what could happen if telecommunications companies carry only the content of individuals and organisations who can afford to pay for it.
10 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
One of the oddest strands of the WikiLeaks story in the US over the past year — and this week marks the one-year anniversary of the release of the “collateral murder” video that first launched the site to fame — has been the reaction of other journalists. Traditional media outlets would seem to share much in common with the whistle-blowing site, most importantly the core public-service mission of holding power accountable.
US media outlets, though — and even those that have worked alongside WikiLeaks — have been among the outfit’s harshest critics.
“They’ve been joining — even leading — the chorus calling for the prosecution of WikiLeaks,” liberal columnist Glenn Greenwald said Friday at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston. He held particular scorn for New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who has been on a public speaking circuit lately trying to draw a distinction between the responsible Gray Lady and its troubled “source.” (Just imagine, suggested Christopher Warren, of the Australian Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, if every journalist had to pass the personality test to which Julian Assange has been held.)
Theories abound as to where all the hostility comes from, and it does seem to be unique to the American media. In it’s simplest form, it may be rooted in pure competitive jealousy. But Greenwald and several other panelists Friday pointed to a more worrisome strand in the US media psyche — a fear of illegitimate interlopers among the professional class of “gatekeepers.”
This could have dangerous consequences, Warren warns. When US media outlets like the New York Times insists on calling WIkiLeaks a “source” and not a media partner, they make it easier for the government to deny WikiLeaks — or any organisation like it in the future — the institutional protections afforded the press.
Australian journalists get this, Warren said.
“They understand that if we allow WikiLeaks to be singled out,” he said, “it’s a threat to every person who seeks to practice independent journalism.”
One of the other great ironies of this story is that, as Harvard professor Yochai Benkler has pointed out, government officials and traditional-media critics have come down all the harder on Wikileaks as it has grown more responsible, and come more to resemble a traditional media organisation than a mere document-dumping one. From the “collateral murder” video to the Iraq war logs, to the Afghan diaries to the diplomatic cable cache, WikiLeaks has evolved in how it releases documents, whom it gives them to and what gets redacted.
Today, it functions an awful lot like a media outlet in that sense — but a media outlet that differs from the Times, in Greenwald’s eyes, in that it feels no deference to the US government.
