Frederick Lane, newsfactor.com Mon May 21, 11:46 AM ET
A new study reveals that government censorship of the Internet is
increasing around the world, even as technological advances make such
censorship inherently more difficult. The study also shows that
governments are censoring not just the usual topics -- revolution,
governmental protest, human rights, religion, sexuality, and pornography
-- but also applications such as Google Earth and Skype.
The study was conducted by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a partnership
among four prominent universities: Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and
Toronto. Funding for the study was provided by the John D. and Catherine
T. MacArthur Foundation.
In a press release, John Palfry, Executive Director of the Berkman
Center for Internet and Society and Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard
Law School, underscored the seriousness of the problem.
"Online censorship is growing in scale, scope, and sophistication around
the world," he said. "As Internet censorship and surveillance grow,
there's reason to worry about the implications of these trends for human
rights, political activism, and economic development around the world."
Censorship Study Methodology
The ONI team selected 41 nations for its government censorship survey,
using two main criteria: whether the content survey could be conducted
safely (which eliminated North Korea and Cuba) and where the most
information could be gleaned about how the government censorship
actually worked.
According to the ONI press release, a global network of researchers used
"a suite of sophisticated network interrogation tools" to make roughly
200,000 observations of government censorship of the Internet.
The study concluded that in 25 of the 41 nations examined, the
government filtered or blocked Internet information to one degree or
another. Topical censorship efforts ranged from the narrow (
South Korea's aggressive censorship of information relating to North
Korea) to the quite broad (
Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia filter a large number of specific topics,
as well as a great deal of information relating to those topics).
"States are applying ever more fine-grained methods to limit and shape
the information environment to which their citizens have access," said
Ron Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Center for Internet
Studies at the University of Toronto. "Some states block access to a
wide swath of content across all of the categories in which we tested,
while others tend to concentrate on one or two narrow baskets of content."
Official vs. Private Censorship
Not surprisingly, the most popular "baskets of content" for filtering
are: politics (Burma, China, Iran,
Syria, Tunisia, and Vietnam); social or moral content (Saudi Arabia,
Iran, Tunisia, and Yemen); and national security (Burma, China, Iran,
Pakistan and South Korea).
Nations in Europe and North America (including the United States) were
omitted from the study, the ONI team said, because government-filtering
practices in those countries are generally more open and better understood.
In the U.S., for instance, the First Amendment generally prohibits
government censorship efforts, although Congress has been able to
require filtering on library and school computers by tying filters to
federal funding.
The ONI team also pointed out that in Europe and North America, private
corporations play a much larger role in Internet censorship, both in the
workplace and in their efforts to protect and enforce copyrights.
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