Return-Path: <sentto-279987-5007-1027041437-fc=all.net@returns.groups.yahoo.com> Delivered-To: fc@all.net Received: from 204.181.12.215 [204.181.12.215] by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.7.4) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Thu, 18 Jul 2002 18:20:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 9719 invoked by uid 510); 19 Jul 2002 01:16:35 -0000 Received: from n4.grp.scd.yahoo.com (66.218.66.88) by all.net with SMTP; 19 Jul 2002 01:16:35 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-5007-1027041437-fc=all.net@returns.groups.yahoo.com Received: from [66.218.67.201] by n4.grp.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 19 Jul 2002 01:17:20 -0000 X-Sender: fc@red.all.net X-Apparently-To: iwar@onelist.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_7_4); 19 Jul 2002 01:17:17 -0000 Received: (qmail 66104 invoked from network); 19 Jul 2002 01:17:17 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.218) by m9.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 19 Jul 2002 01:17:17 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO red.all.net) (12.232.72.152) by mta3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 19 Jul 2002 01:17:19 -0000 Received: (from fc@localhost) by red.all.net (8.11.2/8.11.2) id g6J1Ioq11450 for iwar@onelist.com; Thu, 18 Jul 2002 18:18:50 -0700 Message-Id: <200207190118.g6J1Ioq11450@red.all.net> To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List) Organization: I'm not allowed to say X-Mailer: don't even ask X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net> X-Yahoo-Profile: fcallnet Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com> Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 18:18:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [iwar] [fc:Why.Countries.Make.Sites.Unseen] Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.0 required=5.0 tests=DIFFERENT_REPLY_TO version=2.20 X-Spam-Level: Wired News <a href="http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,53933,00.html">http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,53933,00.html> Why Countries Make Sites Unseen By Noah Shachtman 2:00 a.m. July 18, 2002 PST If you're reading this from Saudi Arabia, don't bother clicking here. Here. Or here. The Saudi government is keeping its subjects from viewing sites about drugs, women and rock and roll, according to a new Harvard Law School study. This pattern of censorship -- blocking the "Women in American History" section of the online Encyclopedia Britannica while allowing access to CNN.com -- can serve as a kind of Rorschach test of tyranny, speaking volumes about the psychology of a government. "You can get a sense of what worries a regime by what sites they block," said Carin Karlekar, a senior researcher at Freedom House, a pro-democracy group. "In Saudi Arabia, the government's more interested in clamping down on personal freedom than on political freedom. But in China, they're more concerned about political subversion than personal morality, so news sites are the ones that are censored." With the full cooperation of the Saudi government's Internet Services Unit, which is responsible for routing and filtering all international Internet traffic in the country, Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain and researcher Benjamin Edelman tried to access nearly 60,000 Web pages through Saudi servers. A little more than 2,000 were blocked, they found. Most blocked sites were sexually explicit -- which, in Saudi Arabia, includes the Blue Sky Swimwear site. Sites about religion -- from St. Mildred's Church site to the Queer Muslims home page -- also figured prominently, as did ones about women, health, drugs and American pop culture. That's no surprise in a country where the flavor of Islam is strict, and women aren't even allowed to drive. Less predictable is the fact that most of the major personal homepage domains, including geocities.com and members.aol.com, were also filtered out. "My suspicion is that's an attempt to block objectionable material, rather than keeping Saudi citizens from self-publishing," said Zittrain. The Saudi government is maddeningly vague on why a site would be filtered. "All sites that contain content in violation of Islamic tradition or national regulations shall be blocked," reads a declaration on the Saudi Internet Services Unit site. But the Unit is open about how it does its job. "All incoming Web traffic to the Kingdom passes through a proxy farm system implementing a content filtering software (SmartFilter, from the California firm Secure Computing). A list of addresses for banned sites is maintained by this filtering system," the Unit's site says. A form on the site lets subjects suggest new offensive sites to add to the list. Saudi Arabia is one of dozens of governments around the world trying to control content their citizens see online. Unauthorized use of a computer or a modem earns up to 15 years in jail in Myanmar, for example. That's why some see the Harvard study as old news. "It's been well known for years that foreign countries are using censorware to control citizens' access to information," Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said. But only a few regimes -- notably, Vietnam, China and the United Arab Emirates -- actually attempt to filter their entire national Internet traffic wholesale, Edelman said. Future reports from Edelman and his mentor will focus on these governments. "If you're trying to get into the club of rich, industrialized countries, filtering's not something you want to be seen as doing," Edelman added. "But you need to be wealthy enough to afford a filtering system. So it's not happening in Africa, for example. There's no money for it." What's more, the state has to want the business benefits of information technology, without the political or cultural impact that comes when information is free, Nina Hachigian, director of the RAND Center for Asia Pacific Policy, said in a recent report in The Washington Quarterly. North Korea, in keeping with the country's isolationist, agrarian agenda, has simply rendered Internet access illegal. The schizophrenic fight by Jiang Zemin's regime in China to clamp down on political freedom while increasing economic choices is reflected in its helter-skelter pattern of censorship. "The (Chinese) government's choices can appear somewhat random. On a given day, savetibet.org is blocked but freetibet.org is not. China blocked the website of The New York Times for years until its editors had the opportunity to complain directly to President Jiang Zemin, while the site of USA Today has never been blocked," Hacigian wrote. "China reserves more intense and thorough efforts at blocking for high-priority campaigns such as the crackdown on the spiritual group Falun Gong." Falun Gong is widely viewed as one of the biggest threats to communist leadership in China. In addition to filtering, the government in China is also pushing content providers to self-censor. Yahoo's Chinese language site is among the portals that recently signed a pledge not to publish "pernicious information that may jeopardize state security and disrupt social stability." For people in China who want this sort of information, Six/Four, a forthcoming anonymous surfing protocol from the hacker group Hacktivismo, may be of help. Six/Four may also assist Saudi Arabians who need their fill of juvenile humor, because fart jokes, as an example, are apparently off-limits in the Kingdom. So are jokes about celebrities munching on testicles. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Will You Find True Love? 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