International: November 2009 Archives

With networks swamped by SPAM, pornography, hate speeches, illegal gambling and even terror literature, Internet blocking may have emerged as the apt illegal content handling solution for the cyber police. Rattled by the explosion of such content, countries around the world are stepping up Internet blocking. However, research has found that this increasing clampdown on the World Wide Web is hardly having any effect.

On the contrary, experts say that attempts to block offensive content have actually started backfiring by providing an easy reference list for offenders desperate to gain access to illegal content.

In a report (released late October) entitled "Internet Blocking :Balancing Cybercrime Responses in Democratic Societies," funded by George Soros-founded Open Society Institute, four European cyber experts noted that citing public interest, quite a few democratic states globally have started promoting the use of Internet blocking technologies in relation to various types of content.

"But while blocking has helped to some extent," said Marco Gercke, one of the authors, and a director at the Institute for Cybercrime Law, an independent research institute on computer and Internet crime in Germany. "All blocking methods largely in use today can be easily circumvented. So from a technical point of view Internet blocking does not prevent intentional access."

"We analyzed Internet blocking both from the legal point of view as well as from the technical side," Gercke added. "And we found that it can only help accidental access to certain content but it will never stop desperate people accessing such content"

Indeed in the zest to make cyberspace cleaner and as crime-free as possible, as governments around the world -- democratic or otherwise -- have increased censorship of the Internet, the right to unimpeded Internet access without interference is emerging as one of thorniest issues in the virtual world.

The primary means of Internet censoring or blocking is that content is stopped from reaching a personal computer or computer display by a software or hardware product which reviews all Internet communications and determines whether to prevent the receipt and/or display of specifically targeted content.

However, the four expert -- as well as authors of the report -- that got together early this year in a new effort to study the motivations for implementing Internet blocking (vis-à-vis the legal issues around such control), found that the term "Internet Blocking" itself has become somewhat a misnomer.

While the term suggests that Internet could be blocked by a simple action of switching on or switching off the network to illegal or undesirable content, in reality implementing effective censoring is far more complex.

"We found even as blocking can be easily implemented superficially, the fact that the Internet was designed to  ensure data can flow around any barriers, makes it easy to bypass blocking with little effort," says Cormac Callanan, one of researchers who is also the director of Aconite Internet Solutions, a cybercrime and Internet security advisor.

According to the researchers, there are basically two reasons that make Internet blocking ineffective: one, when content is blocked, it is not actually removed from the source, so strictly speaking the content is always available behind a barrier, which is not very hard to surmount.

Secondly, there is no one central authority to decide what should be blocked. "Usually it is either the government or the government-controlled regulatory authority or often the service providers that take the blocking decision," says Gercke. "Consequently blocking becomes not only ineffective but also a sensitive rights issue."

"Most countries do not apply democratic principles and there are no independent authorities to vet whether that blocking list was made through a democratic process of evaluation," he adds.

Therefore, in order to make Internet blocking effective, it is imperative to exercise proportionality, suggest the researchers. According to them, countries should craft Internet blocking strategies in a manner that will not only address the negative effects of illegal content and criminal activities. But such a measure must also ensure that other rights and freedoms are not violated.

Photo by Akbar Simonse. CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic