Category Archives: Transhuman News

The U.S. joined a new consortium of nations focused on keeping the global internet free from disinformation and censorship, largely a response to Russias physical and digital invasion of Ukraine, where internet infrastructure is being attacked as part of the ongoing war.

Announced on Wednesday in a National Security Council briefing, a senior administration official said that the U.S. is formally launching the Declaration for the Future of the Internet initiative in collaboration with over 50 other countries.

The declaration affirms fundamental principles regarding how countries should comport themselves with respect to the internet and to the digital ecosystem, the digital economy, that commits governments to promoting an open and free global, interoperable, reliable and secure internet for the world, the spokesperson said.

The Declaration for the Future of the Internet is modeled after principles belying other multinational organizations like the United Nations, World Trade Organization and the Group of Seven. Current member countries include Italy, Israel, Bulgaria, Canada, Belgium, Iceland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Spain, Taiwan, Uruguay and more.

The US and partners endorsing this declaration will work together in the weeks, months and years ahead to implement these principles to promote this vision globally, while respecting each other's regulatory autonomy within our own jurisdictions and in accordance with our respective domestic laws, international legal obligations, the spokesperson added.

Promoting human rights online is a priority of the initiative. The spokesperson said that the group has been in the making for about a year, as the U.S. worked in tandem with other like minded democratic countries to combat online misinformation.

The Declaration for the Future of the Internet is looking to welcome more countries into its membership as operations continue.

We believe that DFI will advance a positive vision for digital technologies anchored by democratic values, the spokesperson said. We look forward to working with governments, the private sector, international organizations, the technical community, academia and civil society and other relevant stakeholders worldwide to promote, foster and achieve the shared vision.

Among the authoritarian countries the Declaration for the Future of the Internet looks to work against are Russia and China, both of which have faced allegations of human rights abuses and censorship within their own internet networks.

The spokesperson said that the Biden Administration sees the coalition as a response to the divisiveness seen online amid global political turmoil and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that has fueled deep social rifts mirrored online.

We're not here to splinter the internet, but frankly to save it from splintering, the spokesperson said. The internet was originally a network of networks designed to interconnect everyone and we think there's extraordinary value in that and we're here to try to restore that vision.

While this group intends to foster unity within global internet connectivity, the U.S. has recently taken defensive digital measures as tensions between Russia heighted. In March, President Joe Biden issued a statement warning of a rising threat of cyberattacks on the U.S.s critical infrastructure sectors, and U.S. lawmakers have responded by proposing new legislation that would enhance cybersecurity in sensitive fields like health care.

Officials reiterated that the Declaration for the Future of the Internet is not a bilateral treaty or agreement. Rather, the consortium will work to dismantle violations of civil liberties like unlawful surveillance, internet connectivity interference and censorship.

See the rest here:
U.S. Enters International Initiative to Oppose Online Disinformation and Censorship - Nextgov

Legendary UK-based hip-hop artist and activist Kareem Dennis, aka Lowkey, uses his considerable talents as a musician to pay homage to the voices and struggles of the oppressed, from the plight of migrants that have fled to Europe, to the suffering of Iraqis and Palestinians in the Middle East, to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. His work, including his single Voices of The Voiceless with Immortal Technique, and Long Live Palestine (also known as Tears to Laughter), are hip-hop classics. His song Terrorist?, a searing condemnation of the hypocrisy of Washington and Western governments, was swiftly censored by many digital media platforms.

Hes long been a target of the Israel lobby in both UK and the United States, which blocked him from receiving a visa to perform. The University of Cambridge postponed his March 8 Zoom talk, The Israel Lobbys War Against You. The British press has engaged in an ongoing smear campaign against the rapper, and there is an organized effort to get his music removed from Spotify.

Chris Hedges interviews writers, intellectuals, and dissidents, many banished from the mainstream, in his half-hour show, The Chris Hedges Report. He gives voice to those, from Cornel West and Noam Chomsky to the leaders of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who are on the front lines of the struggle against militarism, corporate capitalism, white supremacy, the looming ecocide, as well as the battle to wrest back our democracy from the clutches of the ruling global oligarchy.

Watch The Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET.

Listen to episode podcasts and find bonus content at The Chris Hedges Report Substack.

Chris Hedges: Welcome to the Chris Hedges Report. There are very few recording artists I admire more than Kareem Dennis, the legendary hip-hop artist known as Lowkey. He uses his considerable talents as a musician to pay homage to the voices and struggles of the oppressed, from the plight of migrants that have fled to Europe, to the suffering of Iraqis and Palestinians in the Middle East, to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. His work, including his single, Voices of The Voiceless with Immortal Technique and Long Live Palestine, also known as Tears to Laughter, are hip-hop classics. His song, Terrorist?, a searing condemnation of the hypocrisy of Washington and Western governments, was swiftly censored by many digital media platforms.

In 2011, the Jewish Chronicle described Lowkeys increasing influence and worldwide recognition as one of the most gifted lyricists in hip-hop as a potential nightmare for Israel and its Zionist supporters. He has long been a target of the Israel lobby in the UK and the United States, which blocked him from receiving a visa to perform in the United States. The University of Cambridge, under pressure from the Union of Jewish Students and the Israel lobby, postponed his March 8th Zoom talk, The Israel Lobbys War Against You. He was blocked from speaking and performing at the annual National Union of Students Conference in Liverpool. And British prime minister Boris Johnson, weighing in on the censorship campaign against Lowkey, said a few days ago that British University for far too long have been tolerant of casual or indeed systematic antisemitism, adding that he hope[s] that everybody understands the need for rapid, and indeed irreversible change, before announcing that the United Kingdom needed a new antisemitism task force, in his words, devoted to rooting out the problem at all levels of the education system.

The Cambridge Palestine Solidarity Society says it now fears it will be banned, as have many students for justice in Palestine groups in the United States. The British press has engaged in a daily smear campaign against the rapper. And there is an organized effort to get his music removed from Spotify. As the crimes of the Israeli state become more and more apparent to the public, as even leading Israeli intellectuals can see that Israel has cemented into place a brutal system of apartheid, as a new generation of Jews in the West no longer feel an emotional attachment to Israel, the Israeli state has adopted harsher and harsher methods to silence its critics, including an attempt to criminalize those of us who support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.

Joining me to discuss the fierce Israeli censorship campaign that is being waged against him is Kareem Dennis, or Lowkey. So Kareem, just lay out what theyve been doing recently. Its pretty fierce.

Kareem Dennis: Thank you very much, Chris. Its an honor to be here with you. Im a big fan of yourself and The Real News, of course, for very many years. Now, the important thing for us to point to when talking about the latest aspect of this campaign against me is that the organization which is calling for my music to be removed from Spotify is the Britain Israel Communications and Research Center, which is led by Richard Pater. Now, Richard Pater previously was an employee of the Israeli prime ministers office. And he currently, while simultaneously leading BICOM, is in the reserves of the Israeli occupation forces. The lobby group is bankrolled by its chairman and donor to the Conservative Party, Poju Zabludowicz. His wealth, of course, comes from his father who founded Soltam Systems, an arms company, which was later subsumed by Elbit Systems, the largest arms company in Israel.

Now, BICOM works closely with AIPAC, the very world famous lobby group in the United States. According to the former director of BICOM, Daniel Shek, AIPAC assisted BICOM with developing grassroots networks. And one of those networks would be this particular project We Believe In Israel. Two of the fellows at BICOM, Michael Herzog and Tal Becker, are also fellows of the AIPAC think tank, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. And that director that I mentioned, Daniel Shek, later went on to be the Israeli ambassador to Paris.

Just to articulate quite how deeply entrenched BICOM is within the British media atmosphere, you had a former editor from BBC, Mark Berg, appointed as its director not long after the founding. And not only did he work for the BBC before he worked for BICOM. After he left BICOM, he went back to working for the BBC on some of its most famous flagship shows like Hard Talk.

Another figure who is prominent in BICOM is Ruth Smith, who was instrumental in the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn in the Labor Party. She was appointed as the director of public affairs and campaigns. Now, Ruth Smith was identified in a US embassy cable that was released by WikiLeaks as being a strictly protect informant of the US embassy. And her husband is a key figure at the British American Project, which is an organization funded by the US embassy and BAE Systems, and works to steer the left in this country towards the orthodoxies of NATO.

Also, BICOM were revealed to have worked very closely with the Israeli embassy on the campaign against the academic boycott at the University and College Union. You even had somebody like Tim Llewellyn, who was a former BBC correspondent, say of BICOM that organizations such as BICOM have hundreds of thousands of pounds at their disposal, much of it coming directly from the United States, which sends a third of its whole global foreign aid budget to Israel. This great flow of funds bypasses most ordinary Israeli citizens and goes straight to the projection of Zionist causes and colonialism wherever it might be needed. These funds prop up, here in the United Kingdom, not just BICOM, but organizations like Labor Friends of Israel.

When we look at the particular group from BICOM, it was cultivated by BICOM, is still in the same office as BICOM, and is part of BICOM, which is working on removing my music from Spotify, its We Believe In Israel. Now, this is led by a gentleman by the name of Luke Akehurst whos actually on the NEC of the Labor Party. This is a key decision making body within the Labor Party. Now, he describes himself as previously being a political consultant to defense companies about their sales to the ministry of defense. He was a consultant to Finmeccanica, which was an Italian arms company that had a $1 billion deal to supply training jets to the Israeli Air Force according to the Financial Times. It later became Leonardo, which today is the ninth largest arms company in the world and is a longstanding partner of Rafael, the Israeli-owned arms company.

Now, the allegation is that my music incites violence, and what we can clearly see is the extension of the type of policies which are aimed towards Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and in Gaza. So, the Palestinian Prisoner Studies Center found that between 2015 and 2018, 500 Palestinians, among them children, many children, were arrested for the crime of incitement because of things that they had posted on the internet. You have the example of Tamara Abu Laban in Jerusalem who merely put the words forgive me on her Facebook, and then her house was raided and she was arrested. A 15 year old child were talking about. You also have, of course, the case of Dareen Tatour who wrote her poem Qawem Ya Shaabi Qawemahum, Resist, My People, Resist Them. For that, she went through three years of prosecution, which entailed house arrest, and also entailed being put in prison for at least five months. When Dareen Tatour was released from prison, she was actually given an Oxfam Novib prize for freedom of expression at the Hague, but of course that has not been emphasized in any of the reports.

So as we see, an extension of the war against the Palestinians and their right to speak about what is happening is now being aimed in my direction, along with thousands of others in this country, as we speak.

Chris Hedges: Lets talk about the campaign. You alluded to the vast amount of money these people can use to perpetuate the campaign against you, but how does it work? Is it primarily done through the press? I mean, what are the mechanisms they use to essentially attempt to marginalize you?

Kareem Dennis: Well, its through the press, of course. And we have very clear lines of communication that have been fortified massively throughout the war against Jeremy Corbyn. There are several proxy organizations that have clear links, whether its the board of deputies, which said in its trustees report that he has a close working relationship with the Israeli embassy, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, and the IDF. This was a key group working against Jeremy Corbyn. Or it could be an organization like the campaign against antisemitism, which is led by Gideon Falter, who, simultaneous to leading that organization, is one of the directors of the JNF, which builds settlements in the West Bank and in other parts of Palestine, too.

These are organizations that have very clear links to the Israeli state and what they have sought to do throughout the Corbyn years was build up this communication between them and the media. As I stated, BICOM was primarily focused on the media war, and it has several well placed journalists that work with it at the major newspapers. And you have seen tens of articles published about me, strongly implying that I am That theres an irrationality behind what Im saying. Some type of irrational motivation. Youve also seen me spoken about in Parliament two days running. And, of course, in Parliament, the MPs enjoy parliamentary privilege, which means that they cannot Nothing they say is legally actionable. So I could not sue anybody for calling me a racist in Parliament.

The crux of this when we get down to it is that they are trying to reconfigure the idea of anti-Zionism as somehow antisemitic. When the actual peer of Theodor Herzl by the name of Nathan Birnbaum, who is Very little is known about him, actually, because hes largely been written out of history, but there are a few great books about him He was the person credited with coining the term Zionism. He was a peer of Theodor Herzl and Leo Pinsker, the earlier Zionist thinkers.

Now, he later became an anti-Zionist. So the implication here is that somebody who coined the phrase Zionism and was one of the earliest Zionist thinkers is now somehow antisemitic because he became an anti-Zionist later on. Also, when you look at the amount of citizens that you have within this state, six million of them are Jewish people, meaning that only six million Jewish people are actually believers in the idea of Israel in so far as theyve taken citizenship. But theres 15 million Jewish people in the world, strongly implying that the vast majority of Jewish people are actually not Zionists. And so, this really is about that key issue and trying to force through the IHRA definition, whether that is on private companies like Spotify or in public institutions like universities. That is what this is about. It is about quelling the freedom of speech of not only Palestinians, but their supporters.

Chris Hedges: Lets talk about the character assassination that theyve engaged in. What are the kinds of things that youve heard said about you?

Kareem Dennis: Well, again, its about attributing an irrationality to my ideas. Of course, Ive come under fire for saying that the heritage of Zelenskyy in Ukraine has been weaponized to stave off genuine inquiries into the nature of the far right groups which are involved in the fight in Ukraine and are directly being armed and trained by the government I pay taxes to. So, actually, Im being depicted as somehow antisemitic because I have a problem and an objection to the arming and training of explicitly Nazi organizations. So, its quite the acrobatics are being played with these things, of course.

Chris Hedges: So, youve long been a target. It was a few years ago that you were denied a visa to the United States in order to perform. Why does an artist like you frighten them so much?

Kareem Dennis: Well, I mean, at that time I was booked to perform and speak at the Left Forum and my visa was refused. I think the reason why my music would be quite worrying is because it does not have any strings attached to it which say what I can or cannot talk about. Im also and have been involved in many different political movements. Im a patron of what the British state would consider some of the most subversive organizations, possibly, in this countrys history. Im involved in those campaigns. The key to my music was always about mobilizing people to build critical mass, and also Im a person who has political ideas which have rendered me disqualified from the very narrow parameters of political choice within this country, and Im not afraid to talk about it. Also, seeing my neighbors die in the horrific circumstances that they did at Grenfell Tower. People Ive known since they were children died in there.

And being a witness, an eyewitness, to that. Being an eyewitness to what happened after it. Having the cladding and the ashes in my hair and all over my body and having to wash them off. That in and of itself would render me to be a person of interest to the state, and somebody certainly worthy of quite close surveillance. But then when you add on top of it that this music is quite subversive, that this music is directly challenging people, that it attempts to bring together the micro and the macro, to bring together the criminals with the victims of their crimes, its no surprise that this type of opposition is what I have faced.

Chris Hedges: Right. Well, what they call subversive we call truth. For people who dont know what happened at Grenfell, and I remember walking around that neighborhood one afternoon with you, because its really horrific. But I think its, again, the way the poor have been abandoned and discarded in neoliberal societies. Just tell us what happened there.

Kareem Dennis: So, essentially, you had an orthodoxy, a bipartisan orthodoxy of neoliberal necro-politics in this country across, essentially, the last 50 years. What that meant was the deregulation of so many different industries, and the key one being the construction industry. And that meant that it opened up the creative ambiguity for these companies, particularly Arconic is the company that made the flammable cladding which was placed around Grenfell Tower. The top shareholder in Arconic, of course, being BlackRock. We cant forget that the reason for the insulation and the cladding being placed on buildings was to lower carbon emissions after the Kyoto agreements. But then, the truth of the matter is that the top shareholder in this company, Arconic, who benefited so greatly from it, is BlackRock, who are also the top shareholder in Shell. So this is one of the ways in which power reproduces itself, and what theyve put on these buildings is solidified petrol. So at six millimeters of polyethylene in the material that was placed on the side of this building next door to me. And of course, prior to that, we had understood that all of the blocks including the one I lived in were due to be demolished.

Now, the only block that we understood to not be ready to be demolished in the march of gentrification was going to be Grenfell. And the reason why it wasnt going to be demolished was because it had the refurbishment that placed the cladding on the outside of it. So, one of the most twisted ironies of this is that we considered everyone that lived in Grenfell to be safe from regeneration and to not be likely to be moved from the neighborhood, whereas the rest of us all felt we were on the verge of being moved from the neighborhood. And then the fire happens and the council backs off because they knew it wouldnt be tenable to demolish all of our blocks.

Now, what happened on the night of the 14th of June, 2017, is that a fridge exploded. Again, there wouldve been a background of deregulation within this particular industry that would mean you could have a faulty fridge just explode randomly. But then that fire then spread to the outside of the building and spread across the building in a really unnatural way and led to many people dying of asphyxiation. A young child died being trampled on the stairs. A man jumped from the 15th floor. His body was then taken into the block next door to Grenfell, and a gentleman by the name of Omega came out of his front door and took a picture of the body on the floor outside of his house. Now, he then uploaded that picture onto the internet. And what happened was he was then contacted by a journalist who asked to meet him, who then set him up to be arrested. And Omega spent three months in prison because he took a picture of that dead body which was placed outside of his door.

And it is my conviction that when history speaks, it will say that we as the community were far more criminalized by the British state than any of the companies involved in this refurbishment that killed neighbors and loved ones close to us.

Chris Hedges: And I should be clear, as you told me, this was something you witnessed. I mean, you watched it.

Kareem Dennis: Yes. Yeah. I was there on the night through everything. At one point, there were three generations of one family that died in there from the grandmother to the granddaughters. And at one point they were waving out of the 21st floor at us. We saw the helicopter move towards them, within about 100 meters of them, take a picture of them, which was on the front page of the Evening Standard the next day. The Evening Standard was led at that time by George Osborne. George Osborne, of course, was the chancellor of the Exchequer responsible for the austerity program which cut 10,000 jobs from the fire service, which cut the local fire brigade. And, of course, people within the building were saying, we see [inaudible 00:22:00]. We see the helicopters and we think they might be able to help us and save us. And so, these people were waving at the helicopters to be saved by them. The helicopters just turned around and went in the other direction. And that the three generations of that family, Choucair family, died in the building that night. And we saw it all in front of us and were shouting back and forth to people within that building. So, certainly, coming from a community like this, you would definitely see my music be carefully monitored.

Chris Hedges: But they demonized the families that survived and those in the neighborhood in the same way theyre demonizing you now.

Kareem Dennis: Yeah. I mean, well put. What you saw was the attempt by the mainstream media. You have to remember that what Grenfell revealed was a national scandal, but it was camouflaged as a local scandal. And it was exceptionalized when it should have been generalized. Meaning that you have hospitals, cinema, schools, and houses across the country, and blocks that are lived in and have the same kind of flammable insulation and cladding across it. You have a primary school just a mile away from Grenfell that was built within four years after the fire with flammable insulation that was made by one of the same companies that made the flammable insulation on Grenfell.

So, what had to happen in that early stage was that the local community had to be seen as different from the rest of British society. And people often talk about racism and Grenfell, but I think the way that racism and Grenfell worked was that it said to the rest of the population, you have nothing to do with this community. They are a Prevent priority community, which is, Prevent is the British governments, one of its counter-extremism programs, which basically allocates funding to local government depending on the proportion of the population which are Muslim. So meaning that you had to depict this community as somehow different from the rest of society, so you couldnt have that real horizontal solidarity which needed to happen. And so what weve seen, really, is this massive US company in Arconic, French company in Celotex, theyve been able to get off completely scot-free while the so-called nationalists can puff out their chests saying that somehow they have more in common with the interests of a massive US construction company like Arconic than they do with people that live in neighborhoods very similar to their own.

Chris Hedges: To what extent did the attacks against Jeremy Corbyn Of course, that was, again, orchestrated around the charge that he was an antisemite, and of course successfully. And much of that came from the Blairites within the Labor Party itself. How has that weakened, if it has, the people like you? I mean, to what extent has that kind of knocked out props that might offer support?

Kareem Dennis: Well, it sets up the infrastructure through which the witch hunt can take place. You know, this is McCarthyism 2022. And you set up these bodies whereby their entire purpose is to monitor the social media output of people and to basically match them against a criteria for political subjectivity. It basically established a hierarchy of political subjectivity in this country. Meaning that if you are on the close to 80% of the population who believe that the railway should be nationalized, if you are part of the 78 or so percent of the population who believe that water and household utilities should be nationalized, if you are part of the, again, close to 80% of the population who believe that we should not have nuclear weapons, then you are disqualified from the right to be a participant in the political process in the country.

And the subterfuge through which that was done is pro-Palestinianism. So, if you support the Palestinians, if you assert the humanhood of Palestinians, then you are you very likely And thousands of people. I am one of the fortunate people. When I have had this campaign against me, Ive had the support in the public letter that weve signed and put out to Spotify, the support of a former UN special rapporteur for housing. Ive had the support of a princess of Jordan. Ive had the support of Mark Ruffalo in Hollywood. Ive had the support of yourself. Ive had the support of so many very influential people, but thousands of people during this period did not have their right really looked at and supported by people in a major way. They were kept anonymous. And again, many of them lost their livelihoods, but mostly it was focused on stopping them having any right to be politically active within this society. And that was done through the project of Corbynism. And thats the simple truth of this.

Chris Hedges: Great. Were going to close the show with Long Live Palestine III by Lowkey.

Excerpt from:
The Chris Hedges Report: Hip hop, censorship, and Palestinian resistance - The Real News Network

Adam might ruin your day. But he might save your future.

Adam Ruins Everything was one of my favorite TV shows. When it was canceled, I was really confused and wondered why. Apparently, thanks to a messy media merger, it was taken off the air when networks consolidated. Well, Adam Conover, the host of that show, took his time off and actually looked into media mergers.

What he uncovered is the fight of our life in Hollywood, and many of us do not know it yet.

Adam spoke before FTC Chair Lina Khan and Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter this week about how corporate mergers are devastating working conditions, access to diverse voices, and artistic freedom in media.

Check out this video fromAdam Conoveron the dangers of media mergers.

This was powerful and disturbing. It made me really worried about storytellers.

We've always been truth-tellers who were able to operate with thematic elements that helped us share our worldview. But with the haunting idea that a giant corporation might harbor a different view, and thus censor, cancel, or never allow you to work is a dystopian nightmare. I truly believe this is the fight of our era, especially as these media mergers take over movie studios and consolidate TV networks. And especially as brands like AT&T take over.

As Adam noted, the danger to jobs and to silencing stories they don't like is real. He knows this first hand.

He said,"Let's be clear: TNT and TBS made scripted television with great success since 1989over 30 years. They're still on in tens of millions of homes. The only reason these healthy broadcasters are committing suicide is because of a needless merger that only benefitted the wealthy. The last merger, with AT&T three years ago, killed my network truTV and folded it under TNT and TBS. Now this merger has killed those networks too. Whose jobs will the next merger eliminate? What voices will never reach your screen? Whose stories will never be told?"

That harrowing story shows that this is real and happening. And we need the government to take a much closer look at all of these mergers. If you want to tell stories, you should care about this. And we need to see action from the FTC and DOJ on it now, or we're going to start losing even more opportunities and have media stories controlled by the very few.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Excerpt from:
The Fight Over Corporate Censorship: Adam Conover Warns the FTC and DOJ About Media Mergers - No Film School

Last summer, as protests gathered steam in Cuba, the internet shut down. The general consensus was that the government had instituted the blackout to smother protests. Whether it worked or not is still under question, but that hasnt stopped internet censorship from spreading and not just among undemocratic governments.

Even some of the purportedly freest countries on Earth are increasingly being tempted to use censorship, especially as a blunt tool for unplugging the internet for all. And increasingly, this is now giving way to the surgical precision of specialized, cheap, off-the-shelf products that can help trace and silence specific groups, messages, or individuals.

In this sense, Latin America is a perfect testing ground. Its a region where the majority of states are technically democracies, but where governments slip towards authoritarian methods to get things done from time to time. Governments are using facial recognition technology that disproportionately hurts Black citizens or spying on opposition journalists, sometimes with the broad support of their own citizens.

But, as a global investigation undertaken by Rest of World revealed this week, the silencing goes beyond disruptive internet kill switches or the infamous, and expensive, Pegasus software used for years by governments across the world and Latin America. Today, far more sophisticated and affordable tools exist. These include deep packet inspection, known as DPI, which allows data and the way it moves on the internet to be read by an outside entity.

These rather shady-sounding tools often have legal and legitimate uses, either because of security concerns or because they can help ameliorate the efficiency of traffic. Its what makes this sort of software so problematic; it is a neutral tool that could prevent child pornography or make your Netflix run faster. It can also shut down and silence a governments political opposition.

The concern around these tools also goes beyond the usual suspects (like Cuba or Venezuela). As digital censorship becomes more accessible, more seemingly benign democracies with easy access to this software and with legal measures to use them may be tempted to deploy them improperly. Over the past three years, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and Nicaragua have all passed laws that allow for digital censorship and surveillance in one form or another. It takes just one government official with an authoritarian bent to turn these systems into tools of censorship and repression.

It is not only the governed that are worried though. As government institutions like Mexicos Secretariat of the Economy to Argentinas Senate know, non-state actors are also showing how vulnerable even the most powerful states can be on the internet. In Brazil, a famous group of hackers worked their way into the Ministry of Healths website a number of times. The Brazilian government was lucky; the groups intent was simply to make a point about how vulnerable everybody really is on the internet:

This site remains absolutely shit and nothing has been done to correct it, the hackers wrote on the Ministry of Healths site.

Here is the original post:
Censorship has never been so democratic - Rest of World

PROLOGUESpecial operation and peace

On February 27, a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, radio journalist Valerii Nechay returned to St. Petersburg from a trip to the North Caucasus to find three men in his apartment. Wearing masks to disguise their features, they told him that if he wanted his mother to be left unharmed, he should leave the country.

They neednt have bothered. Nechay already had a one-way ticket booked to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. It actually just helped me to pack my bags much quicker, he said. From Armenia, he traveled on to Georgia and then on again. Rest of World agreed not to disclose his current location, out of concern for his safety.

For nearly two decades, Nechay has worked for the radio station Echo of Moscow, which has broadcast political talk shows and news since 1990. Soon after the invasion of Ukraine began, the station was told, like all media in Russia, to stop calling the war a war.

It led to some kind of jokes we used when we were on air, that Leo Tolstoy once published his novel called Special Operation and Peace, Nechay said. But we usually were trying to find a way to convey the real meaning of the word so saying something like, the war in Ukraine, which the Russian government calls the special operation.

The evasions werent enough. On March 1, Echo of Moscow was shut down by Roskomnadzor, the state media supervision authority. It was the first time it had been off the air since 1991. Its website was taken offline for a time, and its social media accounts soon went dark. The following week, Sputnik Radio, a government-funded radio station, announced it would now broadcast on Echos radio frequency. On March 4, a law was rushed through the State Duma, one of Russias chambers of parliament, banning public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Using anything other than the approved terminology special military operation is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

Intimidating journalists and seizing the airwaves are timeworn methods of censorship. But to more comprehensively restrict alternative voices, the Russian government had to use more-sophisticated tools. Many journalists from closed-down publications and channels switched to publishing on social media. Internet users downloaded virtual private networks (VPNs) to get around blocks on overseas news outlets.

Just a few years ago, the wholesale blocking of social media and messaging platforms would have been almost impossible in Russia, where the internet infrastructure is sprawling and complex, with hundreds of internet service providers and many points of contact with global networks. But over the past five years, the government of Vladimir Putin has created a sophisticated infrastructure of internet control, built partly with commercially available tools, that has allowed the state to block social media, including Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, inside Russia and to disrupt circumvention tools like VPNs, Tor, and the web proxy software Psiphon.

Russia is a pioneer in the use of these tools but not an outlier. The technologies it uses are proliferating, creeping into internet infrastructure all over the world, helped by multinational companies that have turned censorship into an off-the-shelf product. Censored Planet, an internet observatory in the U.S., has tracked more than 100 countries where internet censorship has worsened in the past few years. And even as technically sophisticated methods for information control become easily available, more and more governments are turning to blunt-force tactics, shutting down the internet entirely in response to political opposition or social pressure.

Over the last six months, Rest of World spoke to more than 70 technologists, telecomms experts, activists, and journalists from around the world to track how governments control over the internet has grown and evolved during the past decade. Their testimony shows that the free, open, global internet is under severe threat. Telecomms blackouts and mass censorship risk fragmenting the internet and even undermining its physical integrity. These threats come in many forms, but most of the experts we spoke to trace them back to a watershed moment, 11 years ago in Cairo, when, facing a mass protest movement that was evolving and growing online, the Egyptian government turned off the internet.

Few people have experienced the full arc of censorship and control in Egypt as comprehensively as Nora Younis. Younis started out as a political blogger in 2005, one of the first generation of Egyptian citizen journalists to report firsthand on protests and human rights violations and to publish online. She filmed protests and documented sexual assaults by the police and posted them to her blog and to social media, animated by a belief that shed be able to kick-start change in her country.

I was sure in my navety [that] its just that nobody was brave enough to do this [before], she told Rest of World. Nobody has the technology. Nobody has the evidence. She started reporting for the Washington Post, and, in August 2008, she was appointed digital managing editor of Al-Masry Al-Youm, a Cairo-based daily newspaper. She would soon help to lead the papers coverage of the most significant event in Egypts modern history, a massive popular uprising against the government that began in January 2011.

The beginning of the revolution was, she said, a magical moment. I was in the right position at the right time, in the right place. It was the kind of change that shed imagined years before, although, as a journalist, she insisted on keeping a professional distance. We tried to be reporting the revolution, not making the revolution, she said.

Social media wasnt the cause of the uprising, but it played a huge role. On Twitter, protesters posted images and eyewitness accounts; on Facebook, they set up event pages to coordinate the movement, telling their comrades to come to the squares, to dress in black, to congregate by riversides to protest. It made people feel the sense of usness, Younis said. There is a togetherness: its not me alone; there are others. I will go alone, but I will find others.

There is a togetherness: its not me alone; there are others. I will go alone, but I will find others.

On January 25, 2011, an estimated 50,000 protesters flooded into Tahrir Square, a circular road junction that is the focal point of the citys downtown district. Called to action at mosques, universities and colleges, and online, the protesters represented a coalescence of interests, from supporters of political Islam to liberal pro-democracy groups, feminists, and trade unionists, each with their own grievances against the regime of then-president Hosni Mubarak. Tahrir Square Tahrir means liberation in English became the revolutions epicenter, occupied day and night: at times a celebration, at others a battleground. As Egyptian security forces responded with violence and the death toll mounted, it served as a place of collective mourning.

Caught off guard by the scale of the uprising, the security forces tried to shut down the protesters tools of communication. Twitter was essentially blocked from the evening of January 25 onward, and Facebook was blocked the following day. The restrictions werent wholly successful; information kept leaking out, and people still found ways to organize online. In the early hours of January 28, the government pulled the plug. Internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile operators were ordered to suspend their services, and power was cut to the main internet exchange point the physical meeting point of ISPs traffic in Cairo. For five days, Egypt was almost completely disconnected from the global internet.

On the streets, protesters struggled to communicate with each other and with the world. Banks shut, payments bounced. The stock exchange closed. The countrys huge services sector was left reeling as it lost contact with international clients. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a think tank, estimated that the shutdown cost the Egyptian economy at least $18 million per day.

However, it wasnt as total a blackout as the government hoped. There were still places that had managed to stay connected, via private corporate networks or satellites.

On January 28, Younis checked into the InterContinental Cairo Semiramis Hotel, a five-star resort on Cairos corniche. Somehow, the hotels business center was still connected, as were the rooms, so Al-Masry Al-Youm moved its online operation to a suite there, later occupying three other rooms so editors and reporters could sleep on site.

The western-facing suite Younis and her team occupied featured a balcony overlooking the Nile and the Kasr El-Nil Bridge, one of the main river crossings leading to Tahrir Square.

From the balcony, Younis filmed as protesters moving across the bridge were confronted by riot police. She recorded for six hours as the clashes turned into a bloody, attritional mele. The protestors would get halfway across the bridge and be beaten back with tear gas, batons, and, sometimes, live rounds; then theyd regroup and fight their way forward again. Younis recorded people being shot, people being run down by armored cars. She cut the video together and published it on Al-Masry Al-Youms website, which was still accessible overseas. Egyptians could not see it, she said. But while we were still in that room, we found the video all over, on the BBC and CNN newscasts. They took it from our website abroad, and they streamed it on TV on international networks and the Egyptians were able to see it on TV.

The protests continued. The internet was largely restored on February 2. On February 11, Mubarak left office.

Egypt wasnt the first large country to shut down the internet in response to protests; during the Green Movement uprising in 2009, Iranian authorities throttled networks. But the Egyptian uprising coincided with the global explosion in popularity of social media. The shutdown made the physical vulnerabilities of the web apparent at the moment when belief in its liberating power was at an apogee.

[The internet] had become already so much part of contemporary life, for many anyway, that it was kind of inconceivable that a government would turn it off, or even had the power to turn it off, Brett Solomon, executive director and co-founder of Access Now, a human rights organization that campaigns against internet restrictions, told Rest of World.

Doug Madory, now director of internet analysis at internet monitoring company Kentik, was one of the first people to raise the alarm on Egypts sudden loss of connectivity in 2011. He has since become a kind of herald of impending disaster on the internet, identifying sudden outages and disruptions. Before Egypt, the idea of blackouts wasnt part of the public narrative, he told Rest of World. But the sudden shutdown crystallized in the minds of people watching that the internet wasnt invulnerable, that it could blink off.

The Arab Spring was the top story of the day, globally. You already had everyones attention, Madory said. It captured the imaginations for a lot of people, to have a country of that size just completely go lights out for days, in response to massive civil unrest.

For the protesters themselves, it was a sobering moment. We were very hopeful that now we had the tools to change the world. We were telling ourselves that you cannot really suppress people [who have the] internet, Abdelrahman Ayyash, an activist who was part of the movement and spent the first three days of the January protest in police cells, emerging into the blackout told Rest of World. I think we were a bit nave.

The internet was designed to have no single point of failure. Its a decentralized network of networks that is hosted on hundreds of thousands of machines spread around the world, connected at a software level by shared protocols that allow it to heal around a breach. That resilience was coded in as part of the U.S. governments Cold War planning many of the core mechanisms of the internet having been designed by that countrys military. If part of the network went out due to sabotage or a nuclear strike, the rest would continue to function. This supposed invulnerability is embedded in the internets mythology, later meshing with the freedoms felt by pioneers on the World Wide Web, who found they could build and organize out of the shadow of the old gatekeepers in business, politics, and media: The internet would be empowering, democratizing, and self-organizing; information wanted to be free.

But the internet isnt just software. Its a physical thing with its own geography: massive data centers on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., each consuming as much power as a town; roughly 1.3 million kilometers of inch-thick, fiber-optic cabling laid on seabeds; exchange points crammed into tower blocks in city suburbs; cell towers; and copper wiring. Its not coherent or homogenous but an agglomeration of each generation of technology, often jury-rigged together a reliable system built of unreliable parts, according to Andrew Sullivan, CEO of the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization that advocates for an open web. Its a public good, run in large part on private systems and through private companies, and a global infrastructure that is subject to local laws and local norms.

Its often in its IRL manifestations, where the digital pokes through into meatspace, that the internet is vulnerable to accident or attack.

These are more common than the average Western user, whose networks are relatively robust, might think. Egypts first internet blackout this one unintentional took place in 2008, when several undersea cables were damaged, one reportedly by a discarded anchor, knocking out services across the Middle East and North Africa. This year, in the month of January alone, Gambia lost access to the internet for eight hours, after a fault on the submarine cable that serves West Africa; Tonga, which is served by a single undersea cable, was almost entirely offline for weeks after an undersea earthquake severed its physical link; and Yemens connection was cut by an airstrike.

But while these blackouts were the result of accidents or collateral damage, deliberate shutdowns have become increasingly frequent. The Mubarak regimes shutdown seemed to open a valve.

Access Now has recorded at least 935 total or partial internet shutdowns in more than 60 countries since 2016. Its an escalating pattern: the vast majority of the blackouts have happened in the last five years. Whole countries, including Sudan, Uganda, and Myanmar, have gone offline for days on end, as leaders try to cripple their opponents ability to organize or disseminate information during moments of political tension.

The era were in now started with Egypt. And its not stopped, Kentiks Madory said. Hes witnessed near-constant attacks on internet access, a pattern that isnt likely to reverse course and a remarkable complacency about the threats they pose to the internet. Were like the coyote that just ran off the cliff, Madory said. And then, like that, were falling.

The era were in now started with Egypt. And its not stopped.

Experts who track risks to the internet measure its fragility at a local level by looking at the number of physical entry points, the number of service providers, who owns the infrastructure, and, critically, the intent of the government. A country like the U.S. has more than 1,400 internet service providers and more than 120 internet exchange points, which are almost all privately owned. It has a government that is constitutionally bound to protect freedom of expression and a robust court system that can hold the state to account. It would be almost impossible for the government to legally order a shutdown of the internet in peacetime and difficult to do it illegally by force. That isnt true for countries with far more concentrated infrastructure, where blackouts can be startlingly easy to execute.

Media coverage of blackouts often references kill switches, suggesting that ministries have access to a red plunger that turns off the internet. Sometimes, those kill switches are really just fax machines.

When the Myanmar military seized power in a coup dtat in February 2021, it had just four telecomms operators to contend with, one of which, Mytel, it co-owned with another company linked to the Vietnamese Ministry of Defence. Another, MPT, is a public-private partnership and had strong ties to the military establishment even before the coup. The other two were owned by foreign companies. Once it had taken control of the machinery of government, the military junta issued orders by fax to the telecomms operators whenever it wanted them to shut off the networks or to block specific websites, such as social media platforms or news websites.

Within the digital rights community, there are ongoing arguments over whether telecomms operators should comply with shutdown orders. If an order is legal, a company risks losing its license if it fails to comply. If its issued illegally, by an authoritarian regime or a military staging a coup, the stakes are higher.

When the Myanmar military wanted the internet turned off in February 2021, soldiers were dispatched to data centers, where they enforced the demand at gunpoint. Sources with knowledge of events at one of the ISPs later confirmed to Rest of World that staff had been physically threatened and equipment had been damaged. Several telecomms companies told Rest of World that while they might raise protests, they dont really have the power to defy an order given at the barrel of a gun and that they have an obligation to protect their local staff from reprisals.

Access Nows Solomon said he felt that operators overplay that argument. Im not saying its not a calculation, he said. But are you willing to sacrifice the rights of [millions of] subscribers on the basis of a potential risk to your staff?

These calculations are complicated by the fact that most blackouts happen at moments of acute political distress. The majority of internet shutdowns that Access Now has tracked over the past few years have been triggered by political turmoil, elections, and protests. In August 2020, as people took to the streets of Belarus to demonstrate against alleged voter fraud in the re-election of the president, Alexander Lukashenko, the governments information ministry shut down mobile telecomms. In January 2021, the Ugandan government turned off the internet for more than four days on the eve of presidential elections. That same month, as Indian farmers staged sit-ins and hunger strikes around Delhi, mobile internet services were cut for several days around the capital.

In Eswatini, the government turned off all internet services in June 2021, as pro-democracy protests spiraled into civic violence. The blackout added to the chaos. No one knew what was happening. But one thing for sure is that the police were killing people and the military were killing people. And the citizens were retaliating, Melusi Simelane, who is the chairperson of an LGBTQIA+ NGO, Eswatini Sexual and Gender Minorities, in the country, told Rest of World.

Simelane, who also consults for the Southern African Litigation Centre, a legal activist group based in Johannesburg, is a rare figure in the digital rights space: he challenged an illegal blackout order and won. With support from colleagues in Johannesburg, he sued the government of Eswatini, naming the telecomms companies that had enacted the shutdown as co-respondents. The activists laid an emergency case in front of the High Court, where the judge decided that if freedom of information was a constitutional right, then interfering with the means of communication must be a constitutional issue. She escalated the case to the defacto constitutional court. When the government realized that actually they were not going to win this thing, they turned back on the internet, Simelane said. The whole process took less than three days.

The activists ended up dropping the case on the basis that theyd achieved what they set out to do the internet was back on. The government hasnt shut down the internet entirely since last June, but it has imposed more targeted blocks on social media in response to fresh protests.

The reason that blackouts persist, and proliferate, is that they work. There are few more effective tactics for crippling an opponents ability to organize or disseminate information during moments of political tension.

In Kazakhstan, where the authorities shut down the internet for five days in January 2022, Aina Shormanbayeva, president of the NGO International Legal Initiative, told Rest of World that the blackout had created an information vacuum, in which state media said calm had been restored, as gunfire crackled outside her window.

Months later, activists and investigators are still trying to piece together events. [The blackout] is an effective tactic to hide the real situation that was on the streets and just wash our hands, our heads, our brains with propaganda through TV and radio, Dana Zhanay, a medical doctor and director of the Qaharman Human Rights Protection Foundation, told Rest of World.

These events, which have profound local consequences, are also a threat to the internet as a whole, experts said. The analogy that a lot of people have developed in their heads is sort of like a light switch: you know, you turn the lights off and then you can turn them back on, and it just goes back the way it was. And thats not actually true about the internet, Sullivan, from the Internet Society, said.

The internet runs because of common protocols, common technologies, and global connections. To shut bits of it off means to deliberately engineer vulnerabilities into parts of the network. Its designed to be connected, Sullivan said. Its not designed to be shut down. And, so, what you have to do is undermine the network resilience itself, in order to even get the feature where you can turn it off.

Although blackouts are likely to remain part of governments arsenal for the foreseeable future, they are economically and politically damaging NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages, estimates the cost to the economy of a single day offline to be more than $80 million in Kazakhstan, for example. On top of the direct costs, they create uncertainty that can stop businesses from investing in the digital economy. They cause disaffection among young, connected populations and can drive them to seek opportunities overseas, and they can cause long-term damage to confidence among foreign tourists and investors. Where they can, authoritarian governments want to avoid turning off the internet which is why many have invested in more targeted ways to impose control more constantly and more consistently.

For a short while after Mubarak stepped down, there was a sense of victory among Egypts protesters. Tech workers, bloggers, and Facebook page admins became resistance leaders, fted around the world. Journalists felt they could operate freely, and activists felt the future opening up ahead of them.

Several years after quitting Al-Masry Al-Youm, Younis launched her own digital publication, Al-Manassa, in 2016.

During the uprising, Younis had struggled to figure out where the line was between covering the movement and participating in it; the simple act of journalism felt revolutionary, and many young journalists were buoyed by the collective spirit the usness that Younis referenced and the promise of a future out of the shadow of censorship and oppression. Younis wanted Al-Manassa to reflect that. The site combines traditional journalism with a citizen-led, collaborative authoring platform similar to Medium. It publishes op-eds critical of the government and reports on crises and social issues that the mainstream press tend to ignore.

But in June 2017, Egyptian readers began reporting that they couldnt access the site. The domain almanassa.com had been blocked inside the country.

The Egyptian government has powers to order sites blocked, a practice which had been ramping up since 2010. There was no legal process; Al Manassa had just been added to a secret blacklist. Around the same time, Mada Masr, another independent Egyptian publication, was also blocked. Mada Masr took the governments telecomm authority to court to challenge the block, but because it wasnt clear who had ordered it or how it had been executed, the court said it couldnt proceed with the case, and essentially shelved it for technical review. The Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology did not respond to a request for comment.

Younis team moved Al-Manassa wholesale to another domain, almanassa.net. And then we published a story that they didnt like, and they blocked Al-Manassa dot net, she said. The sites administrators have ended up in a game of whack-a-mole with their censors its not clear exactly who they are mirroring the site to a new domain, having it blocked, then moving again. When the cost of moving domains started to mount, Al-Manassa began using subdomains. Today, were using four Ws, and then almanasa dot run, Younis said. Theyve migrated 13 times. Each time they do so, they lose half their audience and have to rebuild, and while traffic from search engines, which still often index the .com domain, isnt always impacted, traffic from shared content on social media takes a 50% hit, she said.

After nearly three years of moving from domain to domain, Younis reached out to Qurium, a Swedish organization that helps news outlets and civil society defend themselves against cyber attacks and censorship, to try to understand what was happening.

Quriums analysis showed that the blocks were being achieved using a technology called deep packet inspection, or DPI.

Information moves around the internet in packets, which are made up of a payload the content and a header, which contains basic routing information: where the information is going from and to. Earlier network monitoring and control tools just looked at the header, but deep packet inspection allows operators and administrators to automatically look into the payload of a packet and route it based on its content.

This has legitimate uses. A network might want, for example, to prioritize video content that needs large bandwidth, imperceptibly slowing the loading of text-and-image pages for everyone but making sure their Netflix never stutters, or to give priority access to users of certain services. Network operators have also deployed it to try to identify and prevent the spread of illegal material, such as child sexual abuse material and pirated content.

But DPI can also be co-opted as a tool for censorship, redirecting traffic away from a specific website or service and into a dead end. This is what was happening in Egypt. Requests sent from users trying to access Al-Manassa were bouncing back too fast, suggesting that there was some device between the user and the website blocking access. The device returned different kinds of errors for different types of requests, giving Quriums researchers a digital fingerprint that they could use to identify it as hardware sold by Sandvine, an Ontario-based technology supplier of network management technology. Sandvine didnt respond to multiple requests for comment.

Its worth noting that DPI, in general, is a neutral technology, Ramy Raoof, an Egyptian privacy and security technologist, told Rest of World. Its a police officer in the street, organizing the traffic but it has the potential to abuse this traffic. In Egypt, he said, Sandvine has been used in ways that manipulate the internet.

DPI was designed to help telecomms operators route traffic more efficiently, but it can be used for subtle and targeted control.

When people think about online censorship, they tend to think about Chinas Great Firewall, which essentially puts choke points on the internet where it enters and leaves the country, allowing the government total oversight over content. Thats relatively easy in China, because there are only three main internet service providers, and they, and the infrastructure, are effectively state owned. The model has its drawbacks its expensive, because it means processing a vast amount of data at those choke points, and its not particularly subtle but its effective.

Chinas model, however, is hard to replicate. The government has long been committed to controlling what people see and has been willing to throw enormous resources into censorship and propaganda. These were built into the Chinese internet from the very beginning and have been maintained at great cost ever since.

A more likely blueprint for the shape of information control worldwide is Russia, according to Roya Ensafi, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan who founded and helps to runs the Censored Planet observatory, which uses 95,000 vantage points ways to observe traffic to measure blockages and detect major censorship events as they happen worldwide.

The topography of the Russian internet is far more complex than that of China. There are thousands of ISPs, most of which are privately owned, and the Russian government didnt invest early in the infrastructure for large-scale internet censorship. But DPI tools make it possible for it to have the same effect.

In 2016, Ensafi and her colleagues were alerted to a list on the GitHub repository by a contact in Russia. The list was a backup of a Roskomnadzor blocklist for web addresses. It was being updated on an eight-hour cycle, giving them a live look at how Roskomnadzor was shutting down information on the Russian internet. It started out with a few hundred entries but grew and grew, reaching more than 170,000 domains and 1,681,000 internet protocols (IPs) by 2019, when Censored Planet published a paper on the leak, and the live list was taken down. Many of the entries were gambling and pornography sites, but the list included Russian- and English-language news and politics sites and circumvention tools like VPNs.

The task of blocking these domains was mainly left to the ISPs, who had to block banks of IPs or interfere with the Border Gateway Protocol the mechanism thats used to route internet traffic to shut off access to international sites. That was very good at censoring or blocking specific websites. But not everything on the internet is a website, Vadim Losev, a technical specialist at Roskomsvoboda, a Russian digital rights organization, told Rest of World.

The turning point came in 2018, when the Russian government tried to block the encrypted messaging service Telegram, which had refused to give the security services access to user data. [Telegram] is not connected to a specific IP address, and it doesnt have a domain name, Losev said. So [the block] didnt work very well.

The government demanded that the ISPs put in place better controls. Many of them acquired cheap DPI tools, which allowed them to do more than just block individual sites.

Then, in 2019, the Russian government increased the pressure, passing a new digital sovereignty law, which mandated that ISPs install a deep packet inspection device called the technical solution for threat countermeasures, or TSPU, made by the Russian network equipment company RDP and controlled directly by the government. This has created two layers of censorship architecture: one owned and operated by the ISPs themselves, the other by the government.

The investment in censorship technology reflected a general shift by the Putin government toward ever-greater control of the public sphere, according to Nechay, the radio journalist who also taught a class on censorship at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg. The government still conducted overt attacks on the press and political opponents, but it needed more subtle mechanisms. [Modern] dictators prefer to look like civilian leaders, Nechay said. So for this, [they] need to spend some time creating this kind of machine of censorship.

The TSPU boxes were activated in March 2021 to throttle Twitter across the country, after the government accused the social media site of allowing the spread of child sexual abuse material, drug content, and images of suicide, and saying that the platform hadnt complied with takedown requests. The throttling was mostly lifted in May.

Censored Planets analysis showed that the DPI boxes filtered for messages heading to and from Twitter-related domains, including twitter.com, t.co and twimg.com, and dropped any packets that exceeded 150 kilobytes per second allowing traffic to move through at only a snails pace, rendering the service all but unusable. The throttling was a potent demonstration of the technical capacity of DPI for mass censorship and how it could be used to more subtly control what people see online. Throttling of individual services and sites is harder to detect than outright blocking and bans and can be used to disguise censorship as a technical error or localized outage.

The Russian DPI architecture has been used on several other occasions for short-term or targeted blocks, including to restrict access to VPNs around elections in autumn 2021 and to the Tor private browser. Because it inspects the content of a package, rather than just its routing information, DPI can often identify traffic coming via VPNs and filter it out, rendering such circumvention tools ineffective.

Most recently, in March 2022, the TSPU boxes were activated to block Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in Russia and to try to block circumvention tools. The scale and speed of the blocking, combined with the propaganda machine that ramped up to fill the void left, has been a demonstration of the commitment of the Putin government to shutting down the information landscape in Russia.

For the past five years, the Russian government has been pursuing their model, this so-called cyber sovereignty, trying to erect digital borders over the internet so that the state can control what is or isnt online, Allie Funk, senior research analyst for technology and democracy at Freedom House said. And to watch how that has all come to fruition has been something really astonishing to bear witness to.

The success of Russias approach shows how it is now possible to impose control over a complex, robust network without spending huge amounts of money. The model is increasingly easy to replicate, due to the number of companies selling DPI technology. It has become cheap and accessible, with devices costing as little as $6,000 each from commercial suppliers like Sandvine and Allot, an Israel-based company that offers DPI technology.

Citizen Lab alleges that in Egypt, Sandvines PacketLogic DPI devices were used to redirect users away from political news sites and toward affiliate advertising or crypto mining. Citizen Lab said that in Turkey and Syria, it was deployed to send users to malicious sites, exposing them to spyware, and showing how the technology can straddle the divide between censorship and surveillance. In September 2021, Sandvine was used to throttle access to the internet in Belarus during street protests the company eventually canceled its contract there, following public outcry.

In January 2022, Bloomberg reported that the company for a time had deals in Algeria, Djibouti, Eritrea, Iraq, Kenya, Kuwait, Pakistan, the Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan. The newswire also reported that former employees felt the company had essentially abandoned a policy of not selling its technology into situations where it could be used to violate human rights in 2017, after its acquisition by Francisco Partners Management, a private equity firm whose investments at one point included a majority stake in NSO Group, the Israeli company behind the highly controversial Pegasus spyware. Francisco Partners didnt respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Allot has been accused of enabling censorship in Azerbaijan. Its technology was allegedly used in Kazakhstan to throttle Telegram and other social media and communications platforms, ahead of the main blackout on January 5, 2021. Allot did not respond to requests for comment.

Experts in the regulation and export of technology told Rest of World that the unchecked proliferation of censorship technology, like that offered by Sandvine and Allott, has seriously undermined the stability and openness of the global internet.

I think were in a significantly worse position today than we were back [in 2011]. Governments, with their corporate co-conspirators, have invested in the infrastructure of control, Access Nows Solomon said. Were trying as hard as we can to keep the internet open and keep the channels of communication secure but were up against very significant forces.

Al-Manassa occupies half a dozen rooms and a pair of balconies on the second floor of an apartment building on a quiet backstreet in the southern Cairo suburb of Maadi, surrounded by fruit trees and spindly palms. Younis chose the location, 10 kilometers from Tahrir Square and the frantic traffic of downtown Cairo, for its tranquility.

Younis is currently out on bail, after being arrested and briefly jailed in 2020 for allegedly using pirated software, which she denies. If the charge ever goes to court, she faces a fine of 300,000 Egyptian pounds ($19,100) or up to two years in prison.

The oppression she faces isnt just digital. Younis feels a broader tightening of control by the Egyptian government. She has seen friends and colleagues jailed or forced to flee the country. The authorities demand the publication gets more and more licenses to operate right now, Al-Manassa doesnt have licenses to use its own computers. Its journalists are unable to get certified by the national media syndicate, so they risk arrest if they report in the field. The government sets red lines around subjects that media cant report on freely, including the Covid-19 outbreak or the conflict in Sinai. Its like being a rat in a maze, she said. But whats really strangling Al-Manassa is the block on its website.

Younis said she has little hope of getting the government to loosen its grip, but at the very least, she wants to hold the companies that supply it accountable. She has reached out to Sandvine repeatedly, without response. She is now trying to figure out if theres a way to sue the company in Canada or the U.S. She compared the sale of censorship technology to that of arms. You cant sell weapons to countries if they are using it against civilians, right? Why is this not not happening in technology? she said.

Most of her generation of blogs and independent media are scattered or shut down. She counts just three publications still standing. In her words, The censors won. Al-Manassa limps on. Our minimum is to survive. What I tell myself is that at least we survive, we document. So one day when something changes, and anybody wants to look back, what happened in Egypt in those years, people dont [think] that it was completely black, that there was something happening.

This is often whats holding the free internet together: Individuals, NGOs scraping together their funding, embattled independent media clinging on. It is, Younis said, what keeps her going. Were still here.

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From the Arab Spring to Russian censorship: a decade of internet blackouts and repression - Rest of World