[Peace-discuss] The Internet: Collateral Damage?

[patton paul]

 The Internet: Collateral Damage?
Have we let them take over the once-free Internet?
by Ron Deibert


There was once a time, not that long ago, when pundits could claim that
the Internet was a lawless frontier immune to regulation and control by
governments and states. Libertarian by nature, open in its architecture,
the Internet encouraged democracy, freedom, and liberty around the world.
Attempts by oppressive regimes to block information were futile. Thanks to
this unstoppable, open, liberal architecture, citizens would be able to
communicate and deliberate with each other, forming the basis for a
single, vibrant global village polity.

Whatever its original merits, this conventional wisdom should now be
declared dead. Far from being an irresistible force for openness and
change, the Internet has itself become the object of pressures and
regulations by outside forces. A tangled web of increasingly aggressive
actors and interests has turned the Internet into a multi-spectrum
battlefield of twisted alliances and tragic casualties. The future of the
Internet is uncertain.

One battle is the well-known fight over the illegal trade in copyrighted
material such as pop music. Although the celebrated Napster trading system
has largely disappeared into oblivion, dozens of smaller peer-to-peer
trading networks have sprung up in its place. The corporations and their
lobbyists -- those with the largest stakes in the game -- have, in turn,
become increasingly radical in terms of the means they're willing to
employ in support of their cause.

Legislation -- which if approved would be a startling legitimization of
vigilantism -- is being debated in the United States House of
Representatives to allow recording industry organizations to hack into
home computers that trade music and video files.

Meanwhile, ominous threats of cyberwar and the purported use of the
Internet by al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations have led to an
alarming increase of electronic surveillance by law enforcement and
intelligence agencies around the world. Thanks to post-9/11 legislation,
governments can collect and share e-mail traffic and Web surfing patterns
with little restraint.

Privacy advocates are in despair. As the media-rights group Reporters
Without Borders noted recently, the Internet has become part of the
"collateral damage" of the war on terror.

This surveillance has been accompanied by a largely undebated
militarization of the Internet. Government armed forces from around the
world have devoted increasing time, money, and energy to develop offensive
cyber-warfare capabilities, including the capacity to engage in
state-sponsored denial-of-service attacks, and the use of Trojan horses,
viruses and worms.

Although the United States leads in this category, it's not alone. Even
the Canadian armed forces have seriously debated developing such an
offensive capability. In places such as Taiwan, Chechnya, Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Israel and Palestine, quasi-government hackers regularly
attempt to take their respective foes' systems down.

And that's just what squeaks out into the public. Since 9/11, access to
government information on the Web has become increasingly invisible as
authorities use the excuse of the war on terror to remove thousands of
documents and reports, leading some to conclude that scientific progress
itself is in jeopardy. So much for increasing transparency!

On another front, authoritarian governments ranging from Syria and Iran to
China are busy attempting to block their citizens from accessing what
their elites believe is dangerous information by using sophisticated
firewalls at router points.

One of our research projects at the Citizen Lab, led by researcher Nart
Villeneuve, used technical means to trace Internet content-filtering and
blocking schemes on China's national backbone to find out what content the
Chinese government was blocking -- a state secret.

Using a proxy server on three different national backbones in China, Mr.
Villeneuve tested 8,878 URLs to sites ranging from human rights to the
outlawed religious group Falun Gong. He found 647 were blocked -- close to
20 per cent of the sites searched in some categories.

Worse, during Mr. Villeneuve's scan of the router system within China, he
found that the router he was interrogating displayed a signature login
prompt typical of a router manufactured by Cisco Systems Inc., a Western
corporation ("the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet,"
proclaims its Web site).

Given all these battles, what will happen to the hopeful promises of
unstoppable liberty, transparency, and openness? Will citizens around the
world still be able to communicate, debate and deliberate the future of
the global village while virtual bombs drop around them and spies lurk in
every corner? Has the time come for cyber-arms control?

The battle has only just begun.

Ron Deibert is associate professor of political science and director of
the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University
of Toronto.

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