Over the past few weeks, reports have trickled in to Herdict and via Twitter, alerting us of the filtering of individual Twitter pages in Tunisia and Bahrain (as well as, possibly, China). In Tunisia, the accounts of exiled activist Sami Ben Gharbia (@ifikra), engineer @Ma7moud, and popular independent news source Nawaat (@nawaat) have been confirmed inaccessible, while in Bahrain @FreeBahrain was allegedly blocked on New Year's Day.

ifikra and freebahrain ruminate on their Twitter accounts being blocked

Twitter is no stranger to being blocked: Both China and Iran have blocked the social networking/microblogging site in the past, and Saudi Arabia reportedly blocked two individual Twitter users' pages in mid-2009.

What is particularly interesting is that the governments of Tunisia and Bahrain have now demonstrated capability and desire to block individual Twitter pages, thus silencing certain voices while still keeping a major communication platform open. Only time will tell if this will become a global trend.

Soudani was missing for 18 days until Tunisia’s police contacted his family inform them that he is detained in the Murnaguiya prison about 15km away from the capital Tunis.

According to sources, the police also informed Soudani’s family that he was put on trial and convicted for “disorderly conduct” during his detention without legal counsel and was sentenced to four months in prison. They also learned that he had since appealed his sentence.

During his court appearance on December 6, Soudani denied the charges filed against him and stated that he was tortured aggressively during his extrajudicial detention. His lawyers asked for a recess to study the case and his release on bail. The release request was denied while his trial was adjourned to December 14, 2009.

Soudani was interviewed about his past activities as a student leader in the General Union of the Students of Tunisia. He was involved last year in a 56-day hunger strike with another four students demanding their right to go back to school. They have also blogged about their hunger strike experience day by day on a blog which had been censored in Tunisia.

A Facebook group and a blog have been created to support Mohamed Soudani in the hardships he is experiencing.

Nasser Weddady helped in this post.

update 2: November 7th, 2009 - Lawyer Ben Debba said that fatma has been released.

On Monday, November 2nd, 2009, Tunisian blogger and college Theatre professor, Fatma Riahi (34), known online as Arabicca, was summoned to appear before the Criminal Brigade of Gorjani (Tunis), where she was questioned about her online activities.

Fatma was released the same day around 10 pm then summoned again the next day, on Tuesday November 3rd when three Security officers escorted her to her house in Monastir, located at 160 km from the capital (Tunis), to conduct a search for evidence that she may be hiding behind the pen-name of the famous Tunisian cartoonist blogger Blog de Z. They also confiscated her PC. On Wednesday, they escorted her again to her home in search for her passwords and managed to access her facebook account.

Since then, Arabicca has not been released and has been denied to meet her lawyer, Miss Laila Ben Debba, who spoke to her only for few minutes. Arabicca is being detained in Gorjani Police Station and could face criminal libel charge that potentially carries a prison term to up to three years in prison.

Fatma was blogging at Fatma Arabicca. A blog that she deleted three days before the arrest.

A Free Arabicca campaign blog has been launched by fellow Tunisian bloggers in support for Fatma, as well as a facebook page.

On October 20th, 2009, Zouhaïer Makhlouf, a Tunisia Human rights activist and correspondent of Assabil Online website has been arrested for publishing a video report online about the environmental pollution in Nabeul (Dar Chaabane El Fehri), a coastal town in northeastern Tunisia.

According to reports released by several local human rights organizations, it seems that someone called Mourad Ladhib had brought a case against Mr Makhlouf accusing him of filming without permission.

Mr Makhlouf in turn, has denied the charges against him and refused to sign the police report arguing hat the subject of his online video report was part of the activities of the Democratic Progressive Party - a legal party of which he is an active member- to ivestigate social, economic and environmental issues in the area of Nabeul, adding that he didn't film any sensitive areas prohibited by the law and accusing the investigator of politicizing the case.

Mr Makhlouf has since been transferred to Mornaguia Prison in the suburbs of Tunis where he began a hunger strike on October 21st to protest against his illegal detention. Mr Makhlouf will be tried on November 3rd, 2009, on defamation charges and could be sentenced to up to one year in prison, under the Tunisian Telecommunications Code.

On October 26th, Tunisian Security services and plainclothes police surrounded the office of the Democratic Progressive Party in a bid to block a rally in support of the detained activist. Furthermore, and on the same day, State Security also surrounded the house of Mr Makhlouf preventing his friends from contacting Mr Makhlouf's wife to persuade her to stop a hunger strike that she began on October 22nd in support for her husband.

Despite the continuous threats and harassments that he is subjected to, Zouhaïer Makhlouf is one of the most active human rights activist both online and offline. He has published several human rights testimonies (video, audio and textual) which broke the silence on many sensitive issues and human rights abuses faced by tunisian activists and former political prisoners.

During the 8 hours of arrest, blogger Abdallah Zouari was asked to disclose the passwords of his email accounts and interrogated about his most recent report published the day before on the banned Tunisnews website.

Mr Zouari was questioned about Human rights group's members who have visited him during the last seven years and his interviews with the media. Mr Zouari was warned to stop making any statement that could tarnish the image of Tunisia, or face a smear campaign they can run against him by disseminating fake pornographic video for the purpose of sullying his reputation.

Since his release in 2002, after spending 11 years in jail, Mr Zouari is still being confined to an internal exile in a rural district, 500 kilometers from his family's home in Tunis, despite a court order issued on August 2nd, 2009 that ended the seven years of house arrest.

Mr Zouari is placed under round-the-clock police surveillance, prevented from accessing the Internet and prohibited from using local Internet cafés. He has been arrested several times for protesting the banishment and mistreatment and for communicating with the outside world through the Internet.

Abdallah Zouari is blogging at Citizen Zouari‬. His blog is among tens of other critical blogs that are blocked in Tunisia.

Dr Khedija Arfaoui, a feminist retired professor at the Manouba University in Tunis, was accused of spreading a message on Facebook about the rumor of 5 children being abducted from school in Tunisia. Recent rumors that children have been abducted and trafficked in Tunisia have been circulating for some months and have reached epidemic proportions with many parents concerned that their kids will be kidnapped, despite an official denial by Tunisia's Minister of Interior during a press conference.

The rumor has managed to spread throughout the country, especially on the Internet. On Facebook, a popular social networking website in Tunisia with an estimate of 623,000 users, videos and alerts of child abductions have been posted and shared with friends.

Dr. Khedija Arfaoui is a Tunisian women’s rights activists and member of the Feminist Association of Tunisian Women for Research and Development and founder of the Association of Development and Protection of the Environment (ADPE)

Some observers, such as blogger Mokhtar Yahyaoui, a former judge who was deprived of office because of his open letter to the Tunisian President condemning the lack of independence of the Tunisian judiciary, believe that the government needs to find a scapegoat for the rumor.

Juriste Tunisie, a legal information blog edited by a team of Tunisian jurists who seek to promote communication and dissemination of information about the law of Tunisia, has followed the case in all its legal aspects, with emphasis on how Tunisian laws about defusing rumors over the Internet are vague.

In an almost similar case, on March 15, 2005, Ramzi Bettibi was arrested and then sentenced to four years' imprisonment for copying, onto a forum board he moderated, an online statement from a group threatening terror attacks if former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon attended the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia.

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

1. Introduction
2. A short overview of deep packet inspection (DPI)
3. Technical capabilities of DPI technology
4. Reasons for using DPI technology
5. Actors currently using DPI for censorship
6. Scenarios enabled by DPI technology
7. Preliminary Conclusions
8. 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)

Mariam Zouaghi is the first Tunisian woman to be convicted under The Anti-Terrorism Act of 10 December 2003.

Mariam has been arrested on July 26th, 2008, for visiting banned websites, publishing online articles on alleged extremist forum boards and collecting money to support Gaza.

In a phone call with Global Voices Advocacy, defense lawyer, Samir Ben Amor, says Mariam maintained her innocence and denied accusations that she belonged to any terror groups. She also stressed that her case was related to her online activities and her support to the people of Gaza.

Samsoum wrote:

Le blog de 3amrouch a été censure car il a repris une information publique sur un journal canadien qui est accessible a tout le monde. Par solidarité je publie aussi le lien vers ce journal qui cite dans sa page 10 la transaction immobilière qu'on veut cacher a tout prix. Et qu'on censure ce blog aussi!!!

Thoughts of an ex-Muslim wrote:

Ordinary stories blogged saying:

The house of the Tunisian journalist and blogger Zied el-Heni has been raided last night (April 10, 2009). In a blog post published today, Zied wrote that his laptop and CDs which contain all his work have been robbed:

I am sorry to inform you that my house has been raided and robbed on April 10, 2009. They stole my laptop and CDs which contain the efforts of my work day and night. I surrendered to pressure from friends, and reported the incident to the police, who took the usual procedures in such cases.

In September 2008, blogger Zied el-Heni filed a lawsuit against the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) for blocking the social networking website Facebook, which had lasted for two weeks, claiming that the ATI's illegal censorship violated his right to free access to information. The case was dismissed by the Third District Court in November 2008.

Zied's case was supported massively by Tunisian bloggers who declared November 4th (the date of the court hearing on lawsuit that was filed by blogger Zied El Heni against the Tunisian Internet Agency) as a national day for the freedom of blogging.

Zied's blog has been blocked in Tunisia since October 23th, 2008. Thirty other personal blogs are also blocked by the Tunisian Internet Agency.

* Many thanks to Amira Al Hussaini for the translation of Zied's post