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DonateWhen CPJ covered the Pakistani government's attempt to build a massive censorship system for the country's Internet in February, we noted a key problem with such huge blocking systems: they are, at heart, democratically unaccountable.
Committee to Protect Journalists
CPJ Internet Channel
Defending Free Expression Online
Pakistan
Last month, Pakistan's government put out requests for proposals for a massive, centralized, Internet censorship system. Explaining that "ISPs and backbone providers have expressed their inability to block millions of undesirable web sites using current manual blocking systems," the state-run National Information Communications Technology Research and Development Fund said it therefore requires "a national URL filtering and blocking system."
This week, CPJ published its year-end analysis of work-related fatalities among journalists. Six of the 42 victims worked online. While you can read the full statistics and our special report elsewhere, I want to highlight the stories of these six journalists who worked on the Web.
The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab has announced a research project to analyze the global infrastructure of Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. It's looking for BlackBerry users from any country to take part--especially those in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia, Russia and China.
All of these countries have at some point demanded that RIM make their BlackBerry network more surveillance-friendly. Some have threatened to ban BlackBerry services outright if their demands are not met. Other reports suggest that RIM has made concessions to some of these countries' demands.
One possible concession RIM might make is to move its Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) servers to locations within those countries' jurisdictions. BIS servers are the bridges between the internal BlackBerry network and the wider Internet. A locally-hosted BIS server would make it easier for domestic security services to monitor BlackBerry users' general Web traffic.
RIM has kept quiet about what agreements, if any, it has made with any government. Nevertheless, it is theoretically possible to work out the location of these BIS servers externally. If you're a journalist who uses a BlackBerry, all you have to do to help with this project is to visit the RimCheck website using your BlackBerry device and fill out a short form. The site will record the IP address of the machine your request comes from, and will attempt to determine where in the world that server could be located.
The conclusions that the RIM Check project draws from this study will be published when the group has collected enough data. Concrete statistics like this will mean
we'll finally be able to see if BlackBerry's send their data
exclusively through Canadian servers
as some believe or whether RIM has distributed these servers
globally--potentially allowing users' unencrypted Net traffic to be as
monitorable as that sent through a local Internet service
provider.
- Omid Memarian gives insight into the Iranian hardliner in-fighting that led to "blogfather" Hossein Derakhshan's arrest and sentencing.
- Pakistan blocks Facebook, but doesn't block militant jihadi sites.
- What happened when the authorities shut down the Internet in China's Xinjiang province.
- "Deleted" Facebook photos can stay available for years (from the excellent Ars Technica, now banned in Iran).
- Quote of the week, courtesy of Index on Censorship's Free Speech Blog. When asked about Egypt's new pre-election restrictions on mass SMS messaging, government adviser Mahmoud el-Gweini told reporters "We are not making life difficult. We are making life organized, that is all."
Last week, users of Facebook and Twitter in Pakistan began reporting a strange security problem. When they visited those sites, they found they were logged in--but with the accounts and privileges of complete strangers. Private Facebook information and Twitter direct messages belonging to other users were viewable, and the surprised Pakistani users had complete control over these accounts. Soon after the problem was noticed, Facebook and Twitter themselves blocked anyone attempting to log in from Pakistan. Eventually the problem went away.
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