Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert Read Free Book Online Page B

BlackBerry devices are not able to access thousands of websites deemed pornographic and blocked by Research in Motion (RIM). Individuals living in volatile Kashmir are not able to access Facebook. According to ONI (OpenNet Initiative – a collaborative partnership of the Citizen Lab; the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; and the SecDev Group in Ottawa), dozens of governments now insist that ISPs operating in their political jurisdictions implement Internet censorship and surveillance on their behalf.
    Internet filters and chokepoints can have bizarre collateral impacts on users’ Internet experiences around “upstream filtering,” cases where data transit agreements, or “peering,” made between ISPs in separate countries can have spillover effects on Internet users in each others’ countries. In2012, ONI discovered that users in Oman were not able to access a large number of websites with Indian-related content (mostly Bollywood movies and Indian music). The source of the censorship, however, was not in Oman itself nor was itdemanded by the government (for whom the sites in question were not controversial). Rather, it was the Indian ISP Bharti Airtel, with whom the Omani ISP, Omantel, has a peering arrangement.
    This kind of collateral impact of Internet controls has a long history. In 2005,ONI found that when the Canadian ISP Telus blocked subscriber access to a website set up by a labour union intending to publicize its views about a dispute with Telus, it also unintentionally blocked access to over 750 unrelated websites.In 2008, the Pakistan Ministry of Information ordered Pakistan Telecom to block access to YouTube because of films uploaded to the site that purportedly insulted the Prophet Muhammad. In carrying out this order, Pakistan Telecom mistakenly communicated these routing instructions to the entire Internet, shutting down YouTube for most of the world for nearly two hours.
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    Most of the filtering described above takes place at the level of ISPs, the companies users contract with to get their basic connectivity. Butthere is a deeper layer of control, one that stretches down into the bowels of cyberspace: Internet Exchange Points (IXPS). While most users are familiar with ISPs, few have ever heard of IXPS. There are several hundred IXPS around the world: usually heavily guarded facilities with the level of security one encounters at an airport or defence installation. If you’ve ever wondered how it is that your email reaches your friend’s email account with a completely different company, IXPS are the answer. It is here that traffic is passed between the networks of different companies – through border gateway protocols (BGP) exchanged between ISPS – and IXPS are the key strategic locations for the interception, monitoring, and control of large swathes of Internet communications. (In the early 2000s, I toured an IXP in downtown Torontoand saw row upon row of high-tech equipment, endless servers stacked on several floors. Down one long hallway there were hundreds of what appeared to be randomly distributed red tags attached to the equipment. I asked the tour guide, “What are the red tags?” He replied nonchalantly, “Oh, those are the wiretaps,” and moved on.)
    In 2002, Mark Klein, a twenty-year veteran technician with AT&T, was working at an IXP in San Francisco. He became suspicious after noticing some unusual activity in a “secure room” marked 641A. Klein was working in an adjacent area and had been instructed to connect fibre-optic cables to cables exiting from the secure room. He was not allowed to enter the room, and the people there were not the type of workers with whom Klein enjoyed lunch and coffee breaks. They kept to themselves and seemed to have special privileges. Later, Klein learned from his colleagues that similar operations were observed by engineers at other AT&T facilities across the United States.
    Klein’s suspicions