Cyber Conflicts: Internet Censorship

Another looming battle that we see is of internet censorship.

When the governments try to control the public internet, a struggle over information content has caused international discord. Some governments are apprehensive about exposing their citizens to offensive material that might be morally, culturally, or politically deleterious. While other government and citizens' groups vociferously advocate free speech. Effective censorship requires multi layered access control, including laws and regulations, technical filtering, physical restrictions, surveillance, and monitoring, warnings as the last, arrests. Laws and regulations include penal codes, anti-terrorism laws, visual media laws, and legislation allowing government access to ISP and telecommunication company information. For instance, the Chinese government deploys firewalls and gateways to prevent access to certain IP addresses. It also performs DNS poisoning of specific websites and imposes harsh penalties on ISPs and organizations that carry content not permitted by Chinese law.

Many other countries also engage in online censorship including Bahrain, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the list goes on.

And even Germany and Switzerland censors specific web sites for content. Techniques for censoring information include IP blocking, DNS filtering, routing, url and packet filtering, as well as blocking the web feed. Internet content is also monitored through automated tools and manual inspection to block objectionable pages and ISP cooperation.

Censorship can, however, be circumventing through use of proxy servers, allowing anonymous access to censored material. These servers can be blocked and their use discouraged by government threats to shut down websites.

So there's a fight on the censorship fronts. The large companies sometimes fight back. For example, in 2010 Google threatened to remove its Google dot China search engine and website unless China allowed its search engine to access uncensored information.

Remove its offices from China, cancel media events and delay release of phones with Android operating system. These declarations were in response to a chain of hacker attacks on Google's servers.

And brought out the long growing battle of internet censorship into the open.

Concerning the economic consequences of such actions companies cooperating with governments receive preferential access to rights and contracts, while non cooperating companies can lead to potential harassment and litigation. Google was among the first in around 2006 to willfully abide by the Chinese internet censorship regulation. Despite public disapproval in the US, Google's decision, 2010, to suspend censorship rules in China in response to the attacks and is not only financial based but as retaliation for the espionage. The threat of Google alone may not warrant concern, but combined with other large companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo could pose a greater threat to China's situation than any government action.


The leverage of companies against governments and the influence of individual governments have helped in

in multinationals is generally defined by local circumstances.

The complexity of the issue of government control of information is evident from both the public battle, and it is part communication company in motion and it would to mid 2011. When it had to engage with several countries, including China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and UAE so that they could monitor Blackberry communication, ostensibly for fighting terrorism.

Being a cross border network makes it difficult for RIM, or Research In Motion, the company that makes Blackberry, to comply with conflicting laws in different countries. For example, dealing with a call between US and somebody outside, let's say in China, can become very tricky, where US citizens are protected by US laws. China emphasizes the rights of the government to be able to intercept and monitor communication.

So there are a lot of such contentious issues that we are facing. And we need to face all of these issues as we go forward in the cyber warfare arena. There are several actors which have all independent motivation. There are several attacks that can be launched. But one thing is clear, the strategies of national governments are very strong in developing these cyber arsenals. And there's a cyber going on, and we need to discuss it and debate it and make sure this does not derail the free internet and all that we have come to expect of it. Thank you very much.