Cryptography as a means to counter Internet censorship

George Orwells depiction of dystopia in his classic 1984, a society devoid of privacy, may have seemed like an exaggeration in 1949. But, with technology intruding deep into our lives today, we may actually be heading into a less obvious version of a similar state.

Jacob Appelbaum, prolific hacker and a close associate of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, portrayed a grim picture of the future of the Internet when he was in Bangalore this week. He and the group of international hackers he is part of, Cypherpunks, propagate the idea of using cryptography on the Internet to counter surveillance and censorship on the Internet.

Traffic analysis

Censorship is the byproduct of surveillance, wrote Mr. Appelbaum in the book Cypherpunks: Freedom and Future of the Internet, which he has co-authored with Mr. Assange. For mass surveillance of the Internet, the first prerequisite is traffic analysis, a systematic logging of user activity and building profiles of users.

Features such as targeted advertisements are apparently more benign manifestations of traffic analysis.

Gmail and Facebook, for instance, analyse user traffic and activity, and deliver targeted ads, which is a boon to commerce on the Internet. But, the method adopted raise concerns about privacy, and in many cases can be considered an intrusion. For instance, when Google displays ads about pizza parlours after you have read a mail from a friend mentioning the word pizza, it does make one think as to what else Google might know about users.

Google and Facebook are able to identify and profile users because he or she is logged into their services, and have voluntarily identified themselves and have signed away the rights. This makes it easy for these Internet giants to log user activity, attribute it to the users, run social graph programs and build a comprehensive profile of users. While Google and Facebook require users to be logged into their service to profile them, it is possible to monitor users simply by analysing the traffic emanating from their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. This is commonly known as traffic analysis and is the first prerequisite for surveillance.

IP addresses are numbers which can be attributed to people using the Internet; think of IP addresses in the Internet as vehicle registration numbers in the real world. When the IP addresses are monitored for activity, they reveal information about users. Concealing IP addresses is thus the first level of anonymity for users.

Data retention

Browsing the Web without the necessary precautions such as using unencrypted browsing, is akin to sending a postcard by mail instead of using envelopes. The data on unencrypted links can be seen transparently while they are being travelling from source to destination, with very little technical effort.

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Cryptography as a means to counter Internet censorship