Pre-class Discussion for Jan 16

Filtering

• A very cool tool to play with to check if a certain url is filtered in certain countries can be found at this link. Data and search from the good folks at ONI. As an example "playboy.com" is blocked by the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, China, Iran, Myanmar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Singapore, Syrian Arab Republic, Thailand, Tunisia, and Yemen. harvard.edu, on the other hand, is only blocked by China. Kp 01:01, 16 January 2008 (EST)

• Also, the obligatory link to google.cn and google.com side by side image search. Kp 01:08, 16 January 2008 (EST)

Robert Faris & Nart Villeneuve, Measuring Global Internet Filtering

• This article provides a quantitative analysis of various internet filtering methods used around the world. It maps out which countries are using which methods and (perhaps more importantly) what content is being filtered. (Mshacham 18:20, 15 January 2008 (EST))

• Perhaps the most interesting part of this article is Table 1.6, which details the extent to which different types of content are filtered out by countries that block content providers. "Militant groups" accounted only 1% of the filtered content, while "political parties" and blogs accounted for 19% and 20% respectively. (Mshacham 18:26, 15 January 2008 (EST))

• There is an important means of filtering that the article seems to ignore: pressure on private companies. The article discusses how some countries block keywords URL paths, a strategy that "most often affects search queries in search engines" (pg. 15). But a much more direct way of doing this is simply forcing the company that provides the search engine to filter itself. Google's corporate philosophy is to "make money without doing evil," but it nonetheless agreed to create a special, censored search engine for china. How does this sort of strategy compare to the more direct filtering strategies discussed in the article? (Mshacham 13:55, 15 January 2008 (EST))
  • This may relate to the discussion of the "Proposal" below, although the issue may be more broad. A government could use private companies as a point of control by imposing direct regulation with the force of law (this seems implicit in the Proposal). But it may not need to do this, since economic incentives may suffice. (Mshacham 17:44, 15 January 2008 (EST))

• Are there ever situations where filtering should be considered appropriate? Filtering of the sort discussed in this article would generally not be legally feasible in the U.S.: blocking political content would obviously violate the 1st Amendment, and while obscenity is not protected, attempting to block such content (which the authors categorize as "social") would run into the overinclusiveness problems we discussed earlier in the course. But suppose we had a hypothetical way of blocking only websites that provided only obscenity, without affecting access to legitimate material; or suppose we had a way of filtering pure "hate speech" or defamation, without in any way affecting political speech -- what would be the arguments against such filtering? (Mshacham 13:55, 15 January 2008 (EST))
  • It would be especially interesting to consider this in light of the comments of Danielle Citron, which we read for the previous class. If certain online environments "accelerate[] dangerous group behavior," and if such environments have a disproportionately negative effect on women (which the author compares to the effect that the KKK had on racial minorities), would it be acceptable for the government to attempt to remedy this problem through filtering (again, assuming you could get around the overbreadth problem)? Cf. Beauharnais v. Illinois. (Mshacham 13:55, 15 January 2008 (EST))

• On a related note, how does the filtering discussed in this article compare/relate to state and federal laws that require internet blocking software in schools and libraries? (Mshacham 14:08, 15 January 2008 (EST))

• A few technical questions
  • Can someone elaborate on the concept of an "international gateway"? This article focuses primarily on a point of control that is very familiar to us at this point (ISPs), but the notion of filtering at the "international gateway" seems different -- and perhaps more particularly relevant to the U.S-context. (Mshacham 13:55, 15 January 2008 (EST))
  • One fairly simple way to get around some of the more common filtering techniques, such as IP blocking and DNS tampering, would be to use a proxy server that allows for anonymous web browsing; if I understand it correctly, such services allow a user to browse to other sites through the proxy site, thus circumventing any direct blocks. The article notes that fourteen countries use filters to block access to such sites (pg. 12). But isn't this effectively impossible? That is, a country may block sites that are known to provide proxy services -- but can't any computer basically serve this same function? A person in the country that implements the filtering could connect directly to a computer that is outside that country, and then use that computer as a proxy to get whatever material he or she wants. As such, all it would take is a friend in another country who is willing to help out. Am I understanding this correctly? (Mshacham 13:55, 15 January 2008 (EST))

Proposal To Use Search Engines To Administer the Internet and Suggested Next Steps

• I must admit, I'm rather confused about this piece. Neither the syllabus nor the paper itself lists an author (unless I'm completely missing something), so it's very difficult to put this in context. A search on "Ministry of Information Industry" reveals a Chinese government website, and ditto for the Market Administration Department, so my best bet is that this is a plan for effective internet filtering in China. If this is the case, then it connects well to the comment I made above, relating to how private companies can be used as a powerful point of control. If I'm wrong about China, then my only other guess is that this is intended as a parody -- a sort of reductio ad absurdum for internet control; the whole thing sounds ominously 1984-ish (the ministry names, and the stated goals of "control[ling] bad information" and achieving a "clean network"). (Mshacham 17:41, 15 January 2008 (EST))

• As the title suggests, this piece is a proposed method for harnessing search engines and government oversight in order to cleanse the net of "bad information." The basic idea is that internet search engine companies will perform day-to-day monitoring of internet content (by scanning "all content in the websites to which it is connected"); when it discovers a "problematic link," it must immediately delete that link and "report the relevant particulars (including the name of the offending website, the internet address/IP address, etc.)" to the government. The search engines companies must coordinate among themselves and must meet regularly to share information (so that if one missed a site blocked by the others it can take corrective action). The government, meanwhile, will perform regular evaluations to see whether each search engine has met its goal of reducing bad content; the results are measured by the number of links that each search engine returns on a set of "bad" keywords. The ultimate goal, presumably, is that none of these keywords will produce any results in any of the available search engines -- a "clean" internet environment. (Mshacham 18:02, 15 January 2008 (EST))

• How technologically feasible is this proposal? Each search engine is required to scan "all content" of every page to which it connects "in real time." Each company has the responsibility of installing whatever "monitoring equipment" is necessary for this and for "ensur[ing] that its own technical supervision platform has the ability" to perform this task. This would seem like an extraordinarily expensive system to implement; and even cost aside, would a search engine like Google, which is connected to billions of sites, be technically able to do this? (Mshacham 18:10, 15 January 2008 (EST))

• • It all depends on how "deep" the filtering will be expected to go. If all this entailed was banning any URL or even any site that featured certain key terms (ie. Falun Gong) then it would be fairly easy to implement, especially if the government helped in the creation of this sort of list. This of course would make the filtering very shallow and it would be easy to get around such bans through the use of code words and the like. If the filtering were expected to get deeper, then they would either need a powerful AI or they would have to go extremely broad, generating a great deal of both false positives and probably still missing a few sites. The most drastic measure, short of completely blocking all access to the internet, would be to go as broad as possible by banning all sites that aren't on a government-approved list. Anna 00:54, 16 January 2008 (EST)

• How does this method for filtering internet content compare to the ones discussed in the article above? Is it more or less effective? (Perhaps it is meant to work in tandem with the others, so this point may be moot.) I think one could get around this just as easily by using a proxy server (to connect to a search engine that is not part of the proposal). But perhaps the real power of this is that it makes it considerably more difficult for a person to find that proxy server (or any other problematic site) in the first place. Maybe we rely on search engines to such a great extent that a website that does not appear in Google is, for all intents and purposes, "dead," even though it can still be accessed. (Mshacham 18:17, 15 January 2008 (EST))

Jurisdiction

JZ, Jurisdiction in Cyberspace

Exercising jurisdiction requires an analysis of three different things, personal jurisdiction, choice of law, and effective enforcement of judgments. From an American perspective this seems relatively straight forward on the first two. Personal jurisdiction is what we learned in civ pro and conflicts of law, while complicated, are still governed by traditional legal principles. Where things get dicey is in the enforcement area. Kp 00:36, 16 January 2008 (EST)

Enforcement of Judgments

For US companies, at least currently, a lot of policy seems to be decided based on where companies geographically locate hardware and personnel. For example, Microsoft has servers and employees in China and as result doesn't have all that much choice about following Chinese law. On the other hand, Facebook seems to have a policy to not locate any servers in China to avoid this problem. I'm not sure that there is anyway around this. So long as a company has assets in a geographic location they are going to have to follow the laws there. While they might want to try and petition the local government for a certain legal process to be followed, in the end, if the local government wants something bad enough and you have a physical presence there you aren't going to be left with any alternative but to comply. Kp 00:36, 16 January 2008 (EST)

• While Sealand might have seemed like a neat idea I think it failed for two main reasons. 1) It was still dependent on an ISP for internet access that was in turn subject to the control of a traditional government. 2) Governments don't seek to coerce entities through direct force against the data, rather they seek coercion against the individuals in control of that data. For anyone that doesn't actually reside on Sealand it thus provides no protection from the power of the state. Kp 00:50, 16 January 2008 (EST)

Ideal Extent of Jurisdiction

There is a debate about what is the appropriate extent of jurisdiction for governments. While we might think that an international free community is ideal that isn't reality and doesn't seem to be likely in the future. To the contrary, while the promise of the net might have been an international freedom, we are seeing that the net is becoming more and geographically discrete and that states are becoming capable of even more regulation of it.

• While this balkanization might seem to be a bad thing I'm not sure of that. By dividing the internet into different neighborhoods we allow local groups (admittedly defined by current physical boundaries) to set their own norms about what behavior is acceptable. As a result we can avoid a race to the bottom and, for example, European speech restrictions don't have to be applied to speakers in the United States. Of course the flip side of this is that we aren't able to force our ideas of free expression into places where we might think they should be (i.e. oppressive regimes)Kp 00:42, 16 January 2008 (EST)

Other Links

• I'd add this to the home page, but it's locked for editing. I thought this might be of interest: a man in Vermont refuses to give police the password to his PGP-encrypted hard drive, claiming a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. See the washingtonpost.com story here. kim 00:42, 16 January 2008 (EST)