Today marks the second annual World Day Against Cyber Censorship. Launched last year by Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International, RWB today released an updated list of States with repressive online policies together with a report (pdf) detailing current filtering practices of so-called “internet enemies” Saudi Arabia, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
Steven Murdoch, a researcher in the security group of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and member of the “The Onion Router” (Tor) project – an anonymising service that improves online privacy and security – happened to be visiting the BBC World Service Trust offices today so I talked to him for a few minutes about the principles behind Tor, how it is used, and the importance of tackling web censorship.
What is the Tor project?
Tor (“The Onion Router”) is a system for improving people’s privacy on the internet. You can install the software on your computer, and it will allow you to browse websites as normal, except the websites will not be able to track you as you move around. Also, someone who is monitoring what you’re doing won’t be able to tell what websites you are accessing.
Online privacy has started to make the headlines recently with high-profile cases such as the recent Facebook U-turn on privacy changes, so it is gaining more attention. But it is a fairly new awareness. Why should we care?
There are lots of reasons people use systems like Tor to improve their privacy; Journalists use it because they want to protect their sources, law enforcement officers use it because they want to be able to contact their sources, and also undercover law enforcement officers use it because they want to be able to talk back to their home base without revealing that they are working for the police. I think there is a growing interest because there is increasing surveillance and also increasing awareness of surveillance as so much information moves on to the internet, and as so many common day tasks are being done on the internet. It makes it a lot easier for someone who is monitoring internet connections to see what people are doing and to try to gather all this information and build quite sophisticated profiles of users behaviours if they don’t hide it.
Is Tor used worldwide?
Yes, we’ve got users in almost every country in which the internet is available, there’s several hundred thousand users of the software. It’s a bit hard to tell exactly because it’s a privacy system, so we don’t know who our users are any more than anybody else does.
The Tor project represents a technological solution, but as today’s report notes repressive governments are increasingly utilising participatory forms of censorship on the web. Have you done any research on this?
We’ve looked at quite a wide range of ways of controlling people’s access to the internet and of doing filtering. And because one of the things Tor does is to hide what websites you’re going to, it makes it a lot harder to block where someone is going to; makes it harder to block specific websites.
But the technological aspect is just one aspect of the problem. There are also social aspects to censorship. One example is in China where there are little cartoon characters who pop up on the screen to tell you that the internet is not a lawless place and you are being monitored, and that sort of thing causes a chilling effect.
So it leads to a lot of self-censorship?
Yes, exactly. Self censorship has a huge impact because the technical measures can be circumvented with appropriate technology, but the social measures are much harder to tackle, and to train people to do other things to protect themselves. For example, if someone’s got an anonymous blog, it’s not enough that they just use anonymity software to hide where they’re uploading from, but they also shouldn’t use photos that show other people and their nearby environment. They shouldn’t even use the same way of speaking, because someone might be able to say that this article is published by the same author as this article and would then be able to
The report presents a pretty depressing view of the web as a tool of repression rather than freedom. Do you think this is the way things are going, or are you hopeful for the future of freedom of expression online?
The internet is just a tool and it can be used with good purposes and bad purposes. Internet censorship is certainly growing; the number of states who are doing filtering and the extent of their filtering is growing. But the internet is also an empowering tool. It allows journalists who aren’t able to run standard organisations because of government restrictions an alternative platform; they can do things like blog. Things like the Global Voices website gives budding journalists an opportunity to get things out their even though there isn’t a free press in the country. Also mobile phones and mobile phone internet allows people to communicate with their friends and notify the world at large and those in their country when there are problems going on. Provided these sort of things are maintained, then technology is helping maintain the capability of people to do it, and the internet can be a force for good.
You can see that in instances such as the way the student James Buck used Twitter when he was arrested in Egypt, and the way internet activists stay connected.
Yes. The internet reduces cost in many ways. The bad side is that it reduces the cost of surveillance and filtering but the good side is that it reduces the cost of fast communication networks and ways of widely distributing people’s opinions. Twitter is just one example of that, and it can be used for very powerful purposes if the environment is set up for it to be used.
What about at a policy or regulatory level? Is there anything governments can do to bring others to account?
There have been discussions at government level on encouraging countries to be more transparent about the restrictions they have and also to reduce the legal impediments for people speaking out. In some countries there is very heavy press regulation and press registration which makes it harder for organisations to start talking about abuses.
In China, when you publish anything on the internet you have to put the equivalent of your national identity number at the bottom of the post, and that has a chilling effect on freedom of speech.
Do commercial interests and other concerns mean that even western democracies with robust freedom of speech laws have an interest in controlling the internet?
That is becoming a growing problem. When some countries are criticised for having internet filtering systems, a common response is to say that all governments have this. And to a growing extent all governments do. The UK doesn’t have any legislative internet filtering rules but in practice most ISPs (Internet Service Providers) do filter a certain level of material and although the material is clearly objectionable this is giving other countries an excuse for saying that what they’re doing is legitimate.
You can download the full Reporters Without Borders report here (pdf). Steven Murdoch blogs at Light Blue Touchpaper
