The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China's famous “Great Firewall of China” is one of the first national Internet filtering systems.

As you can see in the video, the officers asked the attendees to remove the posters, after the refusal the security guards bundled the poster up and took it away.

The book is a global project from the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a collaboration of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the SecDev Group.

Jonathan Zittrain blogged about the phrase and the incident on his small article “The sentence the UN doesn't want you to see”

Its presence on a poster advertising the OpenNet Initiative’s academic book Access Controlled was enough to deem it prohibited by UN security forces at the Internet Governance Forum, who are shown in these videos removing the poster from the room over the objections of OpenNet colleagues Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski.

ComputerWorld, Slashdot, BoingBoing reported the incident, witnessed by many of the attendees.

The United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 after the Second World War by 51 countries committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights. The work of the United Nations with its 192 members reaches every corner of the globe.

The Internet Governance Forum mandate is to discuss public policy issues related to key elements of Internet governance in order to foster the sustainability, robustness, security, stability and development of the Internet. The IGF Secretariat's activities are funded through extra-budgetary contributions paid into a multi-donor Trust Fund administered by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA).

The topics discussed in the book “Access Controlled” are Internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online surveillance and its increasing in scale, scope, and sophistication around the world, a worthy discussion during the IGF2009.

Below is the statement made by Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski after the removal of “Access Controlled” poster by UN Security services at IGF09. The Video has been recorded by Global Voices Advocacy Director, Sami Ben Gharbia.

It seems now, however, that Internet Service Providers CLARO/TELGUA, TIGO and Turbonett, Guatemala’s most prominent Internet Service Providers (ISPs), are ignoring the laws. Guatemalan users have reported blocked access to Wordpress since Friday afternoon. El Abismo de Tux called customer service and blogged about it, stating that he had received no clear answer from them.

Demuexter reported the blocked access to many blogs hosted on Wordpress. Homo Homini Lupus denounced the censorship in Guatemala and other blogs and tweets are demanding respect for freedom of expression in Guatemala. Micha Micha also reported Wordpress blocked.

Guatemala’s largest newspapers have not yet reported the incident. Other bloggers have called the office of consumer protection, but have received few answers. This block occurs just after a political crisis last month, when social media tools were used to protest against the Government and demand justice.

Under the Twitter hashtag #bloqueowp you can find more updates, and some savvy Guatemalans are using Herdict to report the blocked site.

Let’s hope that the authorities and private companies will stop blocking websites and in the future will respect Guatemalans’ rights as consumers and citizens.

Why should we care about it?

Surveillance and data retention is a problem that deserves Global attention, even for developing countries. In developing countries protests for such causes are sometimes not among the list of priorities, such as poverty, hunger and violence, which are the major concerns. Not quite. In Peru, breaking news points to surveillance coming from the government, and recently in Guatemala, the President himself was under heavy surveillance.

Mass surveillance is threatening the fabric of a democratic and open society and a healthy Internet. Mass surveillance is also endangering the work and commitment of civil society organizations - on and offline. That is why many conscious people got together last Saturday to commemorate Freedom not Fear Day, with a variety of peaceful protests:

In Berlin the greatest protest march against surveillance in Germany's history took place: Participants in the 2 km long, peaceful protest march carried signs reading “You are Germany, you are a suspect”, “No Stasi 2.0 - Constitution applicable here”, “Fear of Freedom?” and “Glass citizens, brittle democracy”. Apart from related music tracks, loud chants of “Belittle it today, be under surveillance tomorrow” or “We are here and we are loud because they are stealing our data” could be heard. During the protests, which were supported by more than 100 civil liberties groups, professional associations, unions, political parties and other organisations, artists played parodies on surveillance society.

It all started with the opposition to a Data Retention directive in EU. Now it has evolved and become global, as expressed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

Freedom Not Fear has evolved into a more general warning: showing how fundamental freedoms like privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic participation lose when reactionary surveillance systems penetrate our open networks, justified by a hyperbolic rhetoric of fear.

Saturday was a day to express why freedom, democracy, free speech, the right to private spaces and the right to private communication are important for any open society, and why mass-surveillance, mass data storage, mass data retention and video-surveillance by governments and private corporations are undermining such important liberties. The Internet is not immune for such invasion, actually, it has become a “tool” enabling many governments to control. The main argument has been Security concerns, but as explained by expert Bruce Schneir on his blog:

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

Events took place in more than a dozen countries around the World, and hopefully in the years to come more voices will join to act against such abuses from Governments and companies.

From a big picture (above) unveiled by Open Rights Group in London, to a meeting of up to 100,000 people in Berlin, activities in Argentina, articles in Chile, an informative talk in Guatemala, and a rally followed by a Statement for October 11, 2008 in U.S., many people joined efforts to express their opposition to the increasing surveillance and controls by governments and also against data retention.

The most important messages were to affirm international human rights, including freedom of expression and privacy protection, repeal legal authorities that permit warrantless surveillance, unconstitutional monitoring and tracking of individuals, and a call to end the culture of secrecy that allows government officials to hide mismanagement, fraud, and incompetence behind the veil of “homeland security”, i.e. a call to transparency.

As GNS Blog said:

Computer technology, with its ability to store masses of data and then mine it for patterns of behaviour, or reproduce it to the unauthorised, or just monitor people's everyday activity, has a huge potential for ill in the hands of repressive or technologically illiterate governments. Equally it has huge potential for empowerment, the enablement of free speech and social networking

Here you can watch this illustrative video on Youtube:

Press quickly jumped into conclusions saying that Russia was attacking Georgia both on the ground and on-line and that was the first cyberwar with a government attacking other also on the Internet, probably by paid “hackers” working for them, when they found out that the President site president.gov.ge and other official sites were blocked. But as expert Gadi Evron said a couple of days after it started on his article Internet attacks against Georgian Websites:

1. There are botnet attacks against .ge websites.
2. These attacks affect the .ge Internet infrastructure, but it's reachable.
3. It doesn't seem Internet infrastructure is directly attacked.
4. Every other political tension in the past 10 years, from a comic of the Prophet Muhammad to the war in Iraq, were followed by online supporters attacking targets which seem affiliated with the opposing side, and vise-versa.

Blurring borders blog has a point on it:

A new type of narrative is taking hold among the coverage of the military conflict between Russia and Georgia. A number of sites are writing about the “cyberwarfare” being waged by pro-Russian forces against the Georgian government. It seems that, like Estonia a year ago, entities evoking the ire of Russia must be forced to combat widespread botnet-based DDoS attacks. I think there is little doubt that such occurrences will be increasingly part of real-world conflicts, but people are rushing into framing this as warfare, which will only lead to military-based reactions - something I fear.

A new, anonymous, ubiquitous enemy to fight was the picture by mainstream media. Warfare and hack attacks are frequently popular items, mostly because it’s a statement that almost always guarantees a reaction. And if it is combines with an armed conflict with Russia it will get additional attention. But it is important to take a second look on it.

“An army of ones and zeroes” was the title of an article by Eugeny Morozov, where he provides details on the attacks and all the information available to any user on the web interested in download the software and attack georgian sites. He tested it by himself and shared the experience:

Not knowing exactly how to sign up for a cyberwar, I started with an extensive survey of the Russian blogosphere. My first anonymous mentor, as I learned from this blog post, became frustrated with the complexity of other cyberwarfare techniques used in this campaign and developed a simpler and lighter “for dummies” alternative. All I needed to do was to save a copy of a certain Web page to my hard drive and then open it in my browser. I was warned that the page wouldn't work with Internet Explorer but did well with Firefox and Opera. (Get with the program, Microsoft!) Once accessed, the page would load thumbnailed versions of a dozen key Georgian Web sites in a single window. All I had to do was set the page to automatically update every three to five seconds. Voilà: My browser was now sending thousands of queries to the most important Georgian sites, helping to overload them, and it had taken me only two to three minutes to set up.

Ethan Zuckrman provides a complete analysis of what he called “Misunderstanding Cyberwar“:

The rhetoric of “cyberwarfare” has a reassuring implication: we understand how to fight wars, so surely we can win a cyberwar. Unfortunately, the truth is more complicated. There’s no magic “cyberspace command” solution the USAF can unleash to defeat a botnet. The administrators trying to bring Georgian webservers back online are doing precisely what any sysadmin does confronted with a DDoS - they are blocking traffic from the IP addresses that are launching the attacks, and sharing these blocklists with administrators confronting the same problems. If they can block addresses more quickly than the attackers can recruit more participants, they’ll win. This strategy is known by the complex technical term “Whack-a-Mole”, and it’s roughly as frustrating as the fairground game of the same name.

Sometimes hacker world is unfamiliar for many of Internet users, even more complex for those that never use the internet (most of the World population). In Georgia, for example, only 7% of the population have access. But certainly almost all the population have access to t.v. and radio news that were repeating the same message: Internet in Georgia under attack, linked to the intervention.

Digital Natives Blog provides an analysis on the attacks on “Cyberwar and Non State Actors” and also discussed the importance of “digital citizenship”:

After the first headlines some experts said that it might be a grassroots global reaction, a protest, an electronic riot. But the first headlines raised concerns on the security divisions around the world, Cyberwar is a strong word with heavy political consequences all around that can shape the future of security measures and intervention of the Internet.

Now the debate among experts monitoring the situation such as Info War Monitor is:

were the attacks in cyberspace part of deliberately planned campaign, or did they happen spontaneously, inspired by events?

For hacktivists code is a form of speech, and their actions from grassroots are an expression of civil disobedience, an effective way to be heard, so their message will not be lost, their way to engage in political participation, to make political statements, something not analyzed in the first headlines by the press. And their hacks are political expressions, not hurting human beings but systems. Of concern of activist and hacktivists has to be the impact of information, misinformation and lack of information during humanitarian crisis.
People might react in different ways to a headline, and public opinion (lacking technology knowledge) can support in the future strong measures to control the Internet if media is not careful enough and pictures attacks as serious threats to global security. It might have an ugly impact to consider hacker actions an “act of aggression”, a “crime against peace”.

And at the end of the day, as as “The Wars virtual dimension” said:

while the political and informational wars are taking place, over there - in South Ossetia, in Georgia - people are dying and suffering. […].

Perhaps it is time to start thinking about internet tools to help those in the middle, as good net citizens and show media and public opinion the huge potential of Internet to do good.