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Topic: "self-censorship" can also be found in scientific
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India recently blocked 32 websites from users within the country in what the government officials call efforts to prevent terrorist groups from recruiting new members. Civil liberties advocates, however, say this action amounted to censorship and infringed upon freedom of expression in the worlds largest democracy. Photo by Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Software engineer Ashwath Akirekadu cant tell you how many times hes logged onto GitHub over the last 15 years, but he vividly recalls the one time he couldnt.

Earlier this month while on vacation to visit family in Bangalore, India, Akirekadu tried to help a local friend who wanted to develop a mobile application. Just as he would have done if he were back at work in San Francisco, Akirekadu turned to GitHub, a collaborative, code-sharing hub used by millions of computer, Internet and data professionals around the world. But this time on Jan. 6, he got an error message.

It was as though theres no website called GitHub.com that existed, he said.

Akirekadu wasnt the only person who had trouble accessing the website. In what the government says is an effort to thwart terrorist groups from recruiting new members and distributing anti-India content on the Internet, the Indian government recently blocked GitHub, the Internet Archive, Vimeo, Pastebin and dozens of other websites from users within that country.

The sites have since been restored, but following President Barack Obamas visit with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India and the two nations strategic defense partnerships forged this week, questions remain about how India, the worlds largest democracy, balances the tension between free speech and national security. How effective is this method in stemming terror attacks? Did India do the right thing?

Critics call this latest move censorship and an affront to freedom of expression, and found it particularly offensive because websites were not given prior notification. Blocks were conducted secretly, leaving users to wonder what happened.

The Indian government maintains that this is not censorship. Instead, India considers these steps necessary to prevent websites from carrying the ISIS related Jehadi [sic] material inviting youth to join ISIS and promoting their policies, according to a statement from Gulshan Rai, director general of Indias Computer Emergency Response Team, which monitors cybersecurity issues.

Rai emailed the NewsHour on Jan. 19, saying that the ban was lifted on all of the affected sites in early January:

First of all, the websites were not censored. India believes in freedom of expression and speech and we are committed to the principles of freedom of expression and speech as enshrined in the Constitution of India.

Continue reading here:
In India, is web censorship justified in the name of national security?

On 20 January, Craig Hockenberry saw a graph that made him utter the words: Holy shit. The data he was looking at showed a massive spike in traffic hitting the email server of his software and graphic design company, Iconfactory. Because the data was coming in at such volume and at high speed, peaking at at 52 Mbps thanks tomillions of requests, the email server was rendered useless.

After the initial shock, an investigation revealed the massive influx was caused by a significant number of requests that were supposed to go to other sites, from Facebook to YouTube, but ended up being routed to Iconfactory. And those requests were all coming from China, home to the Great Firewall censorship machine that decides which pieces of the web the countrys citizens can visit.

Hockenberry wasnt the only one to have suffered as a result. Dynamic Internet Technology, a company that helps people view blocked content, was another victim (though the firms everyday operations might lead one to believe otherwise), the Wall Street Journalreported. According to aReddit post, in one case, Chinese mobile games were making requests for completely unrelated IP addresses, which are basically seeing a DDoS from Chinese mobile devices.

It would appear the Chinese governments use of the Domain Name System (DNS), which converts website nameslike Forbes.com to a numerical IP address so PCs and serverscan talk with one another, had gone awry. China carries out much of its censorship by tweaking DNS to stop people accessing non-approved websites. In security parlance, this is called DNS poisoning ashackers often use it to direct people to malicious sites. But throughout this month, something has gone wrong with Chinas own poisoning efforts. Instead of timing out users connections to banned sites, the DNS system took citizens to seemingly random websites, like those named above. Those online services that werent ready for what would amount to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks flatlined.

Heres whats concerning: if Chinas censorship machine either screws up, or is hacked, it could redirect hundreds of millions of connections to online services and subsequently wipe out bits of the web. Hockenberry said the national government could exploit this control over the DNS system to use every machine in China for a massive DDoS attack on innocent sites. As my colleague Sean quipped, They have weaponized their entire population.

But Roland Dobbins, senior analyst at anti-DDoS vendor Arbor Networks, told me it would be unwise to carry out such an attack. For starters, China would start to clog up some of its internet pipes out to the wider world. And such a brazen move would hardly bestealthy. Theres no deniability, Dobbins added. China has never admitted to carrying out any kind of online attack, despite claims it is one of the more active offensive players.

More worrisome, and possibly more likely, would be an attack following a compromise of Chinas censorship machine, Dobbins added. There were some indications this monthsblackouts were actually caused not by a glitch in the Great Firewall, but by an attack on the Domain Name System (DNS) in China, which converts URLs like Forbes.com to a numerical IP address so machines can talk with one another. DNSPod, a DNS provider, said it had suffered an attack, but little more has been forthcoming.

So opaque are Chinas technical efforts to block large chunks of the internet, its impossible to say how vulnerable the Great Firewall is, Dobbins noted. Sometimes the censorship systems themselves arent very secure. Is it possible that someone could find an exploit to do some DNS poisoning to use it as a botnet? We dont really know because those systems are not open to evaluation.

If the outages last week were caused by errors in updating the Great Firewall, it points to another possibility: human mistakes causing serious disruption to the internet. Any administrator of any large DNS service can make a mistake and it can cause significant collateral damage, Dobbins said. According to reports, the Firewall is currently getting a refresh to block VPNs, which offer a way around censorship by routing traffic through different servers and encrypting connections.

The power to cause epic attacks by using DNS poisoning is not unique to China, however. Any country or body with control over the DNS system could abuse their position to launch huge DDoS attacks. But they couldnt take advantage of as many connections as China, which invests vast sums on its web control mechanisms.

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Accidental DDoS? How China's Censorship Machine Can Cause Unintended Web Blackouts

SHANTOU, China ?? A student with a wide smile and a welcome sign greeted me at the sparkling new airport in this seaside city. She said her name was Jasmine and she was a senior at Shantou University's journalism school, 45 minutes away.

During the drive, Jasmine confided that she was troubled by the Chinese government's latest media crackdown and wondered whether a journalism career was a wise idea these days.

She asked whether the American government censored the press. When I shook my head no, her eyes widened.

"So your journalists can report anything?" she said. "There is so much Chinese media cannot touch."

The student's misgivings are understandable.

Under President Xi Jinping, the Great Firewall of China has become more formidable. China runs the world's most sophisticated online censorship operation and ranks first for the number of journalists in prison ?? 44 at last count by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Google are blocked. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that China shut down 50 websites and social media accounts "for violations ranging from pornography to publishing political news without a permit."

Journalists are the targets of surveillance, online monitoring and physical intimidation. CPJ reported that since Xi came to power in March 2013, "It has been made clear that the role of the media is to support the party's unilateral rule."

Amid the smog of China's media oppression, there is a ray of sunlight.

A 2013 survey of students at the country's leading journalism schools found that the majority opposed censorship, questioned local media's credibility and didn't think journalists should join the Communist Party.

Read more here:
Voices: Rays of hope amid Chinese censorship