Internet Filtering - North Korea

In the Sunday edition of the New York Times reporter Tom Zeller features comments by Prof. Jonathan Zittrain and Berkman fellow Rebecca MacKinnon in "The Black Hole That Is North Korea":

"“It’s one thing for authoritarian regimes like China to try to blend the economic catalyst of access to the Internet with controls designed to sand off the rough edges, forcing citizens to make a little extra effort to see or create sensitive content,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford. The problem is much more vexing for North Korea, Professor Zittrain said, because its “comprehensive official fantasy worldview” must remain inviolate. “In such a situation, any information leakage from the outside world could be devastating,” he said, “and Internet access for the citizenry would have to be so controlled as to be useless. It couldn’t even resemble the Internet as we know it.”

But how long can North Korea’s leadership keep the country in the dark? Writing in The International Herald Tribune last year, Rebecca MacKinnon, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, suggested that North Korea’s ban on cellphones was being breached on the black market along China’s border. And as more and more cellphones there become Web-enabled, she suggested, that might mean that a growing number of North Koreans, in addition to talking to family in the South, would be quietly raising digital periscopes from the depths."

If you are interested in learning more about Internet filtering worldwide, visit the OpenNet Initiative (ONI). The Berkman Center is a member of the OpenNet Initiative, a joint collaborative project between the University of Toronto, Cambridge University, Oxford University, and Harvard Law School. Prof. Jonathan Zittrain is an ONI principal.