Global Voices Advocacy » Ben Wagner

What it is and why it matters: Developing Internet Policy at the IGF 2011 in Nairobi

Ben Wagner — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:00:27 +0000

EDITOR'S NOTE: This post is part of a series of commentaries and guest contributions reflecting on the Internet Governance Forum and the future of global Internet governance.

They Said It Could Never Happen There are many reasons why the Internet Governance Forum that took place last week in Nairobi was completely impossible: A lack of interest from established players who have become weary of the forum and the format, a long stream of stakeholders who couldn't afford to fly to Africa and ongoing United Nations orchestrated debates on the future of the IGF. Even so, thousands of people traveled to the United Nations office in Nairobi to discuss the future of internet policy.

Stakeholder Chemistry Despite the odds and in its own special way the IGF worked and provided a venue for civil society, companies ranging from transnational conglomerates to small regional Internet Service Providers, the internet technical community, academia, governments and international organisations to discuss what they deemed to be relevant internet policy issues. What was particularly noticeable about the IGF were the number of new faces, both from Africa and beyond. There must have been at least several hundred delegates from sub-Saharan Africa who were eager to share their own views. But at least the same amount of non-African IGF novices were milling around, suggesting that the IGF was indeed working.

Why should anyone care? Although there are several reasons why the IGF is important, none of them are particularly obvious. It's still too obvious to dismiss the IGF as a talk-shop, a lobby factory or a house of cards. However all of these metaphors ignore what is actually going on at the IGF: it brings some of the best internet policy people in the world together for a week. Often it gets them to talk to each other and in the best situation they develop projects and initiatives together. Want to do something about ‘the Internet' because you passionately care about how it is (or isn't) developing? The IGF is a good to meet like-minded people who you can work together with to do something about it.

Getting involved For those people who don't want to fly to next year's IGF in Baku, Azerbaijan, you can either wait until the years after to fly to Indonesia of Brazil, or if you want to get involved right away you can get connected to any of the national or regional IGF's. There are dozens dotted around the globe which will be taking place between now and the IGF 2012 in Baku. Or you can browse the list of Dynamic Coalitions (a bit like parliamentary committees) which work on certain issues and join the discussion on where the IGF 2012 should go. The coalitions are open to anyone with some basic knowledge, the ability to communicate with other people and a passion for the issue which is being debated.

Why it matters I've been working on freedom of expression related issues for quite a while now and am astonished by the extent and speed to which the issue keeps changing on a constant basis. Having gone through a revolution, Tunisia decided to stop censoring anything - then again decided to start censoring some content. The UK discussed plans to filter all pornography in order to protect children while China and Iran keep thinking of more inventive ways to harass and cajole their own populations speech on the Internet. In the face of this pressure, I am shocked that there aren't more people advocating for online freedom of expression and that there is little awareness what this will mean for the communications infrastructure we will one day inherit to our children. Last week in Nairobi, Lee Hibbart from the Council of Europe suggested “erring on the side of freedom.” I wonder if the Chinese Foreign Ministry - who were in the room at the time - were listening.

Is the Tunisian internet censorship regime shutting down?

Ben Wagner — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:41:27 +0000

Following persistent widespread protests in Tunisia in recent days and the impending general strike tomorrow, Tunisian President Ben Ali held a speech on the state television chanel Tunisie7 this evening with a long list of highly unusual concessions. Among other points he announced that he will not seek presidency for life, a lowering of the prices of basic foodstuffs, that police and soldiers will stop using live ammunition, and that media and internet censorship will be halted.

Since this speech there have been multiple independent reports that previously blocked internet sites such as YouTube or the OpenNet Initiative are now accessible without receiving the typical ‘404 messages. Nevertheless further tests are required to ascertain whether the Tunisian regime follows through on Ben Ali's statements.

Of course, these ‘promises' do little to change the massive human rights violations that have taken place recently in Tunisia. Rather they are are a sign of the massive pressure the regime is currently under.

Several news organizations have started to pick up on the story:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12187084
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/news/article.aspx?feed=AP&date=20110113&id=12601387

ICANN TLD censorship mechanisms hidden in procedural details of Applicant Guidebook

Ben Wagner — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 16:00:57 +0000

In increasingly oversizied legal & policy documents, it can take some digging to find the real issues presented within. The proposed Final Version of ICANN's gTLD Applicant Guidebook is no different in this regard and many of the most important points are hidden among the details.

Hence when the Dynamic Coalition on Freedom of Expression & Freedom of the Media at the Internet Governance Forum wanted to comment on the new Applicant guidebook, we were happy that Milton Mueller from Syracuse & Delft Universities was prepared to go through more than 300-page document which even ICANN seems to think is too much to read in one go and has split up into five modules as a consequence.

Consequently it should come as little surprise that the statement which was finally submitted to ICANN by the FoE Dynamic Coalition on Friday focuses on 3.4.3., a tiny subsection of Module 3 (Procedures) which may nevertheless have important consequences for free expression at a global level. Rather worryingly the FoE Dynamic Coalition was the only entity to comment specifically on the procedures section (Module 3) of the Applicant Guidebook, as becomes evident from ICANNs lists of submitted comments to the module:

http://forum.icann.org/lists/5gtld-procedures/

The comments made focus on important definitions & mechanisms within the procedures section which would allow objections to TLDs to be made anonymously, based on concepts such as ‘public interest' which are ill-defined internationally and privatises the whole process through a seperate “dispute resolution service provider.”

For those who are still not convinced that these procedures are likely to have significant negative effects on free expression, the inclusion of “morality and public order” within the document should be enough to sway such critics. As there is no globally accepted standard for morality and public order, the term ‘general principles of international law' seems slightly more appropriate.

The points mentioned here are just a brief summary of the whole statement, which can be viewed here:

https://dcexpression.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/comments-on-the-icann-proposed-final-version-of-the-applicant-guidebook/

As part of the FoE Dynamic Coalition, we urge ICANN to engage with these comments and extensively modify the section on procedures addressed. Although the criticism may seem to be only procedural in nature, their impact is highly substantive and goes to the core of freedom of expression concerns in the Applicant Guidebook.

The more the policy process becomes overloaded with increasingly weighty documents, the more important it is to inspect the details of the processes and mechanisms hidden within them. In this case as in many others the most substantive issues may be hidden between reams of paper and text, on page 136 of 305, or in Section 3.4.3.

Study: Deep Packet Inspection and Internet Censorship

Ben Wagner — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:50:05 +0000

Download: Deep Packet Inspection and Internet Censorship

Deep Packet Inspection and Internet Censorship: International
Convergence on an ‘Integrated Technology of Control’[1] *

Introduction

The academic debate on deep packet inspection (DPI) centres on methods of network management and copyright protection and is directly linked to a wider debate on freedom of speech on the Internet. The debate is deeply rooted in an Anglo-Saxon perspective of the Internet and is frequently depicted as a titanic struggle for the right to fundamentally free and unfettered access to the Internet.2

This debate is to a great extent defined by commercial interests. These interests whether of copyright owners, Internet service providers, application developers or consumers, are all essentially economic. All of these groups have little commercial interest in restricting free speech as such. However some might well be prepared to accept a certain amount of ‘collateral damage’ to internet free speech in exchange for higher revenues.
It can be argued that more transparent and open practices from network service providers are needed regarding filtering policy and the technology used. Nevertheless these practises are unlikely to fundamentally endanger free speech. Within the international system however, there are a large number of actors who have a considerable interest in limiting free speech, most obviously states.

As this paper will argue, the link between deep packet inspection and internet censorship is of far greater concern for freedom of speech than its use in traffic shaping or preventing copyright infringement. At the present time many of the states censoring the internet are already known to use deep packet filtering.3

A further question that arises in this context is whether state actors which censor the internet are following the lead of non-state actors and modifying content within the data stream rather than just blocking it. As DPI opens the door for far more subtle censorship methods, it could lead to a move from filtering internet content to editing it.

This paper will start by providing a short overview of DPI and it’s technical capabilities, before discussing the motivations of state and non-state actors using DPI. A short sample of various actors using DPI for censorship purposes will be provided and various scenarios related to censorship which are enabled by DPI will be introduced. Finally, some preliminary conclusions will be drawn and technical and institutional responses to dpi will be sketched.

A short overview of deep packet inspection (DPI)

Deep packet inspection technology has been used in various forms since the late 1990s. Its initial development was closely linked to the security industry and early versions of DPI found their way into firewalls and other security software during this time.4

The rise of denial of service (DoS) attacks at the beginning of the 21st century further contributed to the rollout of DPI technology, as it was seen as an effective form of defence against this and other forms of attack.5 Advances both in processing power6 and in DPI technology allowed for the advent of security products including very advanced features such as “application intelligence.”7

“Generally speaking, DPI focuses on analyzing all the content of data packets passing through the network, the headers and the data protocol structures (as opposed to the prior “Shallow Packet Inspection” that would only analyze the packet header) and compares this content against rules or signatures (for example, virus signatures).”8

What Security Focus described as the “Firewall Evolution” in 2003 has quickly come to signify that a large number of security products and firewalls now incorporate DPI technology.9 The use of DPI solutions has become so widespread that it is now used by many major global internet service providers. Furthermore, the use of DPI technology has become pervasive across the Internet, with most users frequently completely unaware of its existence.10

Before discussing the implications of the widespread use of DPI, a detailed description of the technical capabilities of DPI will be provided.

Please Continue Reading Complete Report here (pdf), link to it and help disseminate this important information.

Table of contents

Introduction
A short overview of deep packet inspection (DPI)
Technical capabilities of DPI technology
Reasons for using DPI technology
Actors currently using DPI for censorship
Scenarios enabled by DPI technology
Preliminary Conclusions
References

—-
Notes:

[*] A first draft of this paper was presented at the 3rd Annual Giganet Symposium in December 2008 in Hyderabad, India. For their advice and support preparing this paper I would like to thank: Ralf Bendrath, Claus Wimmer, Geert Lovink, Manuel Kripp, Hermann Thoene, Paul Sterzel, David Herzog, Rainer Hülsse, Wolfgang Fänderl and Stefan Scholz.

[1] (Bendrath 2009)
[2] (Frieden 2008, 633-676; Goodin 2008; Lehr et al. 2007; Mueller 2007, 18; Zittrain 2008)
[3] For further examples see page 6
[4] (Theta Networks Inc 2008; Top Layer Networks 2008)
[5] (Houle and Weaver 2001, 21; Top Layer Networks 2008)
[6] (Cox 2008)
[7] (Leyden 2003)
[8] (Theta Networks Inc 2008)
[9] (Dubrawsky 2003-07-29)
[10] (Anderson 2008; Kassner 2008)