 So welcome everybody and thank you. Today's topic, it should come as no surprise, is the Open Net Initiative. This is a project that Rob and I have worked on here at the Berkman Center, but which joins four universities. Actually it joins the University of Toronto, University of Cambridge, and University of Oxford. There are four of us who are principal investigators. In addition to me here, Jonathan Zitron, our good friend and still a Berkman professor, is the one leading the charge at Oxford. Ron Debert from University of Toronto, and Rafal Rosinski from Cambridge. So though we are talking about results, perhaps as though they come from here, it comes from many, many people working over many years. And the number of researchers, several of whom are in the room, have already introduced themselves as certainly over 50 in terms of having collected the data set that we're talking about here. So lots of credit belongs to lots of people. Where we stand just briefly in the project overall, and then I'm going to turn over to Rob to talk about results is about five years ago, Jonathan Zitron and Ben Edelman, who was a student fellow at the time, started doing some crazy things like long-distance phone calls into China to determine what somebody could see if you were surfing the web there, and wrote the first substantial report on the great firewall of China as it's come to be known. Also did a similar study in Saudi Arabia, and other researchers at the same time were discovering the same story. And it probably was a small handful of states that were doing technical filtering back then, 2001, 2002. And what we're here to talk about today is what's happened over the last five years, and to give a preview of the first ever study of 40 countries, and to suggest what some of these data show. Come in Oliver, and to lay out at least some of the fault lines that we think are emerging and trends. We are not officially releasing the results today. We'll do that in May at an event in Oxford with our colleagues. So we can't give you the full story exactly today. So it's sort of a preview. And there will be a book coming out from MIT press later in the fall that will have the full, full story. So that's when it will all come up. But we'd love to kind of get some reactions from you at this stage. In terms of the overall framing, why we care about this and why we study it, Yokei Benkler has written this quite extraordinary book that I think everybody here knows, The Wealth of Networks. I'm teaching the last class of the term, Drew and others have coming to it today in a class of Internet and Politics, and we're reading the chapter in Yokei's book that's the battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment. And to me, in many ways, this story of the open-ended initiative is one of those battles over the institutional ecology of Internet. And one of, I think, the most poignant, both in terms of how different states are seeking to control the information environment and how they're reacting to the changes in the way that politics and democracy are being carried out or affected through Internet, but also the extent to which these states have to rely on others, intermediaries, individuals, to carry out this filtering and the extent to which they can't do it alone. And it is in that broader sense the way that this battle is playing out. Should we push ahead here? Let's push ahead, yeah. So the open-ended initiative, here's our new logo, which a group of, we put out a logo contest. This is the winner. This is an exciting finding of hundreds of people have given us logos. So we're delighted to show you for the first time the logo. In terms of the, that it's replacing that I that you see up there, which wasn't so good as a logo. The overall message of those 40, from studying 40 states and how they filter the Internet is that we've found a little over two dozen of them actually do technical Internet filtering. So kind of trend number one is to say from Saudi and China, five years ago, maybe Iran was filtering, then maybe Thailand, they're now at least two dozen states. The primary places where that filtering is happening are three regions of the world, not exclusively, but primarily Middle East and North Africa, which has the largest number of places that do technical filtering East Asia with China, sort of as the hub, obviously, and then hearts of Central Asia, the former Soviet states. There are other places outliers from that story that do a few in Sub-Saharan Africa. I'll talk in a minute about the early results from election monitoring in Nigeria that we just did in the past week. But those are the key places. And in each of those regions of the world there are anchors, as you'd imagine, places that do the most of the filtering. China, in East Asia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia, perhaps a few go from the Gulf to North Africa and Uzbekistan in Central Asia. As you mentioned, we're putting it out in a book form, which you see up here, but that's boring. And here's a question to leave you with as we go through the results, which is this is the website that we're about to roll out, the new home of the open-end initiative and our results. What we'll have up here is, most importantly and differently, a much more, hopefully, transparent showing of what we found, but also a welcoming to all of you and to others. And here's what I'd love to leave you with as we go through, which is how can we make the open-end initiative as a research project something that is able to capture more of what we're actually studying, the sort of wisdom of the crowds. We would love to figure out how to get you or others involved. How can we be much quicker and more responsive in our testing and inclusive and then also make the data more relevant in policy settings to decision makers and so forth. One of the things that we're trying to do is to get people to suggest sites that they want us to test when we next go into these areas. That's a simple thing. And others to be able to search on a URL and see where it's locked in the world, testing against the data set and so forth. And we'd love to come back to that question and get some thoughts from you as to how we can do that better than we have before. Dr. Ferris. Thank you, sir. I'm going to take you on a quirky eclectic selective tour of internet filtering around the world. I wanted to start off by putting up a taxonomy of internet content restriction strategies. The point being that filtering is only one of many ways in which you can limit access to information online. This list is somewhat different every time I do it, and I'm not sure this is the right one or not. But where a website is clearly illegal or offensive and people, the authorities have the power to take it down within the country, they just simply take it down. There are government to private actions. There's also private to private relationships that will achieve the same thing. Search results, removals in the case of Google Yahoo and others where websites are delisted. They're not exactly invisible, but they certainly are much harder to find if they are removed from them. Arrest intimidation is certainly a very compelling way to limit access. There are indirect ways to do it. Denial of service attacks for hacking. Registration, licensing, and ID requirements are also going to chill free speech online. Making ISPs liable for the content that is found is another way that it's going to drastically reduce the amount of information that's out there. Monitoring and surveillance is another one. If you have the perception that someone's looking over your shoulder, that's going to limit where you go and what you post greatly, whether that perception is true or not. Just to poke in on this, one of the key things we wanted to convey with our book in the study is there's technical internet filtering, which is a state stands between an individual and something they're trying to access, but there are a zillion other ways that this regulation in fact happens. It might be intellectual property law or it might be a clamp down on the debold scenarios and things that Yochai covers in his book. It's also often soft controls, things where individuals either self-censor or get others to censor. It's very important as we talk about, okay, there's a lot of filtering, technical filtering in the Middle East, to note also that lots of filtering is happening in lots of different ways, including in the United States, of course. Exactly. Thank you. This is Egypt where they've sentenced a blogger to prison. There is no filtering in Egypt, but they are certainly trying to limit what is shown there. The targets of internet filtering, I'm going to take you on a quick little tour of that. There's the usual suspects, which is material that's harmful to minors, IP rights, socially sensitive topics, pornography, gambling, drugs, alcohol, national security concerns are often cited for filtering, political opposition, religion, and void. To be clear on IP rights, it's not the rights that are blocked, but things that people think are subject to their rights in which they've been... It's infringements upon the intellectual property rights. Thank you. Korea by most accounts is the most connected place on earth. You're not, however, from Korea going to be able to read the propaganda that's emanating from the north. I stole this sequence from Ethan. Thank you, Ethan. This is a prominent blogger from Bahrain who has been blocked periodically in Bahrain. This is a brilliant mashup which shows the inequality of land distribution in Bahrain that was circulating on the internet at the same time that Google Earth was taken out for a few days there. I don't think that was a coincidence. Bahrain is an example of a small handful of countries where there's a list of blocked sites circulating out there. You can see here at the Bahrain Center for Human Rights they have a list of 21 sites that are blocked. This is by far the exception. Just a pause on this knowing you have a lot more slides to go on. The point there is that in most cases people don't know what's being filtered, right? So there are very few instances we found, basically none, where you can actually get a list. There have been lists floating around places like Thailand on the internet and so forth. It turns out those lists aren't particularly accurate and we can show that. But it's one of the key themes is how much transparency does the season have to know about how the filtering is happening and what's actually being filtered. Great. Wikipedia has been blocked in China. It's blocked in Burma. Reporters without borders is blocked in Tunisia and Iran and China, I believe. Human rights and political opposition is one of the key things that we're interested in, certainly. Human rights watch. A lot of the same suspects there, Tunisia, Iran, and others are blocking this. BBC News is blocked in China. This particular one has a story about the opposition leader in Zimbabwe being arrested. You can see this in Zimbabwe, however, where there was no filtering at all. That's again, it's evidence of a completely different strategy as you intimidate people and that the influence and the depth and the coverage of the internet is not the same in Zimbabwe as it is in China and it hasn't justified a filtering strategy there yet. It's not because we think that Robert Mugabe is not filtering the internet on some principle or something. Did you want to jump in, Ethan? Well, there's also a level of paranoia there that people are very careful what they do online in Zimbabwe because they have the perception that people are reading their emails and watching where they go. The soft controls point. One of the key things we're highlighting in the book is this notion of anomalies also, which Ethan has one axiom and then there are pushbacks against that axiom. One might presume that there's a high correlation between those places that regulate media, for instance offline traditional media and the internet, but there are also places like Russia, Algeria and so forth where we found next to no technical internet filtering where one might perceive that there would be. So both I think the places where we find it and where we don't. This is going back to China. There's a Google search compare that you can find on the O&I site, which will show you I'm sorry my Chinese characters didn't come through when I captured this, but there's Google.com. If you put in Tiananmen, you'll see tanks coming up first in Google.cn. The first thing on the left is much, much happier. It's tourism promotion of going to the forbidden city, so very different there. Moving on to Pakistan, there's an active independence movement in Balochistan that's blocked. Michelle Malkin is blocked there. Jihad Watch is blocked there. They also block Hindu Unity, which is one of the things they share with India. India is an interesting case of a democracy grappling with free speech and internet blocking. They blocked this site and of course made it much more notorious in doing so. It's kind of a very fringe kind of marginal site at best, which has probably seen a lot of traffic since the Indian government decided to block it. This is, Ethan, is this Sammy's work, the Tunisian prison map? This is Sami from Garbia, who is now our advocacy director, is a long-time Tunisian free speech advocate based in the Hague. This is a Google map showing the location of prisons and the attributes and prisoners held in these different things. This is, of course, blocked in Tunisia. Tunisians like to say they go to Algeria for the freedom. Right. One of the things we've seen around the world is the blocking of bloggers. Pakistan has taken out blogging servers, Ethiopia as well. Again, this site is blocked in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is one of the most recent entrants into internet filtering and is focused primarily on political speech. In Thailand, you won't find this page, which is where you can buy a copy of the book The King Never Smiles on Amazon.com. If we have time at the end, we could talk about the YouTube blocking of Thailand's blocking of YouTube. This is another quirky site, Arab Times. This is the one site that we've found that elicited the ire of the Jordanian ruling family in order to block it. This is blocked across the Gulf. It's a political parody site. Religion is blocked in many cases. Of course, pornography and sexual materials are blocked in many places. The Gulf countries are the classic social filters out there. It's very impressed that Rob managed to find examples from both Playboy and gay.com that were workplace safe. We're laughing actually. The finding a gay site was more difficult, but anyway. Gay and lesbian content is filtered in many countries around the world as is drugs and alcohol things. Gambling, too, blocked in many countries around the world. The Gulf states block it much more comprehensively than countries such as Korea and Thailand who have dabbled in that in the past as well. One of the trends that we also write about here is the notion of reverse filtering, in the extent to which some people who are providing sites end up blocking access from other places, which is something that we're seeing anew in this set of research. Some examples of that would be gambling sites, but also some of the dating sites. J-Date does this, right? Where there's blockage of where people can access J-Date from, as opposed to some place that is trying to block their own citizens from seeing it. Another is the military site. Some of the dot mill sites in the United States can't be accessed from other places in the world because on our side we decide to block the access, which is obviously a twist on the basic story. The anonymizers are blocked in many places around the world. StupidCentorship.com, you won't be able to find that in most places. There's a handful of countries that also blocks the Onion Router tour. Boing Boing is blocked in a number of places. Tunisia is one, Iran is the other, and Boston is a third. Here's a site. It's the URL. It's premaritalsex.info and the heterosexual purity. This is blocked in many countries. It's actually a site which is promoting abstinence, but in these countries the ban is so complete that we don't even want to talk about not having sex. This leads into the notion of where these blocks are coming from and who's making the decisions. In the case of Bahrain they have a list of 21 sites. Jordan 1, Singapore has a list of 100 symbolic pornography sites that are blocked. Thailand has a list that looks like it was put together by a bunch of guys in a room or who knows who it was. Most countries, if you're going to comprehensively block the internet, have to rely upon software, and software too cannot do it by human means alone. There are automated ways of identifying what is offensive and what's not, and there's lots of mistakes made in doing so, and this could presumably be one of the mistakes there. Daily Motion, which is a YouTube alternative, was recently blocked in Tunisia. The reason it was blocked most likely is because the software company that made the classification of that site classified it as pornography and took out the whole server with every single video on it. Internet filtering is inherently flawed. There's lots of over blocking. The simplest way to block the internet is through IP blocking or DNS tampering. If you block an IP range then you're going to be blocking all the sites that share that same IP address. I think it was the case of Pakistan going after a blog there that ended up taking out tens of thousands of websites and doing so. Underblocking is also a problem. Extrapating certain pieces of information from the internet is just about impossible and leads to the whack-a-mole analogy, which I love. We also have miscategorizations of the software that leads to filtering. Just to pause on the inherently flawed point, one of the things we're trying to get of course is how technically internet filtering happens, but also what are the choices that a policymaker has to make if they decide that they do want to do some kind of filtering? One of the choices that we believe you have to make as the sensor is are you going to overblock or you're going to underblock? In the United States context, when we think about server-first amendment, overblocking isn't much of an option. In other places, underblocking may think about it differently in different policy contexts. We want to try to set that into relief, but without stating it in a normative sense off the bat, but rather in a positive way for starters. Exactly. I think I'll just touch pretty on this. There are many different places where these controls could be enacted at the international gateway. Most of the blocking that occurs around the world that is government mandated happens at the ISP level by the internet service providers. There are of course institutions blocking for their own reasons, and in many cases there are volunteer programs that are promoted by the government in which end users install filtering software on their own computers. This is a brief overview of what we've found. There's a cluster of about two dozen countries that block the internet. The take-home story in this is there are very few countries out of the total that focus solely on social filtering, Singapore being the example of that, or security related. India, South Korea would be an examples of that. Once you put in the administrative and technical infrastructure for blocking the internet, you tend to block not only social but also political and conflict and security as well. How you interpret that I think is still open. Transparency is a huge question in this. This is a blocking order that we got a copy of from India. Some countries are very explicit about the blocking that they carried out. Others aren't. I think there's two big elements to this. One is as a surfer, do you know you're being blocked when you're being blocked? And the other point is when you are blocked, do you have any redress? Is there anyone you can complain to? And would you be willing to complain? What are the blocking criteria? Are they transparent? Is it part of an open public dialogue? Is there a review process? What's the policy on collateral blocking, which is the overblocking we spoke of a moment ago? And how are you informed of being blocked? This is from Iran. You're very clearly being informed in this instance that you're not to go there. This is from the United Arab Emirates. I'll read the text off of this. We apologize. The site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political, and moral values of the United Arab Emirates. That covers a lot of ground right there. I like it. You can click there to request that to be unblocked. What happens to you and which list do you go on? I don't think is readily apparent. Also, how you know that site you're looking for should not be blocked if you can't see it in the first place is a problematic piece of this as well. I'm sorry? Do you actually get unblocked? I think that Saudi Arabia and UAE is actually fairly open to this. In these cases, they're using commercial software that does make mistakes, as we mentioned earlier. And if there's a clear mistake been made in the software, then I think they are probably open to unblocking that. Depends what the grounds are in which you're asking to have it unblocked. If you're trying to say it doesn't fit the criteria, it's wrong, then I think you're much more likely, particularly in Saudi to get unblocked. A better system would be to say we're using smart filter if you think this is being improperly blocked right to them and they would probably get more responses to that. Okay, we're going to wrap up right here. Uzbekistan, this is Korea. You get this block page which shows you the IP range as well. This is Tunisia spoofing a error page which is in fact a block page. One of the issues we have, of course, is the profusion of technology around the world that's coming from the West mainly. There's a few emerging themes that have come from this. There's more concealed filtering. There's an increase in the number of countries filtering. There's many more considerate in doing so. There's event-based filtering which I'm going to let John talk about in a moment. And there's an expanding global debate as well which we think is good and healthy. We're also going to leave a few questions on the board for discussion and that's my piece. That sounds good. So sorry that that was such a rapid fire tour of a ton of data but my sense is given the time that we should pause there and open it up for reactions. I'd love to prevail on Professor Bankler back there to be a respondent. He didn't know walking in the room that he was going to be but we'd love to get some initial thoughts and then open it more broadly for questions. Well I mean first of all I think it is enormously important work and admirable to actually have data on what's happening in so many places. It's a little unfair given that you're giving five years of work in 20 minutes but I think one of the... Is this necessary? I mean... It's not necessary but it's a game. It's actually more needed for people in the back row than at the table sign. Because of the presentation and this may be something you'll have to do with the introduction to the book or the formal rollout. So it's a lot of the richness that comes out of the detailed country studies gets lost in what here is presented as filtering is growing. It's all basically bad and sensorial here in the countries. I happen to have consumed two of your reports in Saudi Arabia and Iran about five months ago in writing about communications in the Middle East and I have to say that the level of detail that goes into the country descriptions suggests a different maybe focus of how to use the data and how to slice it in terms of trying to analyze how the countries are different. So for example transparency. This was actually a good conversation right here. How do you as somebody who respects democracy deal with the transparent process in Saudi Arabia say which happens to be something that from that study I went and actually looked at at the site and what they do. They say exactly what it is that they're doing. They talk about it in terms of protecting a certain kind of cultural discourse. They make it available for people to add to and subtract from both government employees and people calling in. As you say they're fairly responsive. There's a category of question of if what we're interested in is internet filtering and mapping that as opposed to having a single right sense of what free speech and democracy require mapping these differences what's bad what's good how much worse would I think be very helpful you meant you you had the site of blogger up there but I think one of the things that's interesting if and this is as I said I didn't prepare so it's been five months since I looked at this material but if I remember correctly there's huge difference between Iran and Saudi Arabia where Saudi Arabia only starts rolling out after they have the control mechanisms in place and then they self consciously add blogging later on whereas Iran starts out with a freewheeling internet that they don't really focus on and are jerry-rigging so what are the differences there the fact that is I recall at least from the last only one major blogging hoster is blocked in Iran but there are others that are live both internal and external and there's a very very lively Farsi blogosphere so I guess I'd be interested in hearing how you begin to map these rich and details and very different findings on to a set of concerns that have to do with democracy different cultural commitments to different cultural things that we agree or disagree with if we're willing to say that between Europe and the United States there's different perspectives of nudity and Nazism inverted in some sense if we have a transparent process in Saudi Arabia where do our where what are our limits so so how are you thinking in terms of giving people peers into the internal divisions and diversity as well as mapping it on to different types of political considerations so goes without saying this is a good question and core to much of our thinking I would have three reactions to it we're doing in essence three things I think when we say what are we at core spending three million dollars over four years to do it's to collect the data it is to make an empirical data set that enumerates the way in which internet filtering is occurring around the world with the methodology that we feel this sounds and on which other people can then draw conclusions that we you know you write in page 266 of your book about it right the first ones we want you know goldsmith and we'll write chapters support the idea being a data set on which other people can rely the challenge in that context is how do we present it in a way that people can use it usefully and that's what we're sort of trying to do with both the website as it stands now and the country studies as we roll them out 40 you know of them together one balancing question there is do we really want to give an open API to all of the sites that are blocked around the world to everybody for instance to the sensors if you were one the you know 28th state to come online would you want for us would you we want for us to have the world's collected list of URLs out there for them to suck down and then choose from is that a good thing or a bad thing we've got all of those questions going but that's point one and we're most comfortable talking about this in positive and not normative terms that at least I am anyway because I don't know the question the answer to one of the questions we have up there on the previous slide is is there such a thing as good internet filtering is it the case that some people actually get access to more internet because if you think internet itself is good because filtering could happen in that place on a limited basis and so forth there are a lot of really complicated normative questions there answer number two is this question about how much should we write in the country studies so our first strategy was right very long we've written about 15 quite long quite detailed studies the Iran and Saudi ones examples of this which are roughly speaking 60 or 80 pages they're meant to be very contextual they're meant to bring in a lot of the political detail how the technology works the sort of topology of internet and so forth turns out that not that many people read those and they take a long time to do we spent many years doing the first 15 or so these reports and so we've shifted toward trying to create broader coverage shorter reports and then deep dive on some that have specifically interesting stories and then hope that other people will build upon it thinking of it sort of in wiki-like terms and then third is to do a book on it which is the only way we thought that we could actually you need something of this kind of heft to try to set the context in place and the way the book is written it's more or less to bed at this point is a fair amount of data as straight as we can give it here's what we found here's where blocking occurs here the types we obviously have to superimpose some judgments there but you know look across the 40 countries and then it has a series of chapters that are contextual that jonathan zitsch and i wrote a handful of them rob uh wrote one someone wrote one on hacktivism ron debird and rafael rzinski we have one on the technical thing and it's supposed to basically those are our takes on the context for it in which it belongs and the the sort of richer stuff and i guess that the short of is we're trying to have it not just both ways but always that we're presenting a data set some little bits of context and then our take on the context but i'm certain we're not there yet in terms of doing it right i don't know if you have a sort of best practices or a way to think about that i found that it is to be enormously valuable because because they allow you to get a much richer sense of what the futures might be how filtering is or isn't playing a marginal role relative to other forms of intimidation and constraint and so to even be able to evaluate is filtering important at the margin in these relevant countries having the depth and richness of the case studies uh to me was more helpful than having the uh aggregate data although the trend issue the fact that you've got more countries right uh becoming as it were more sophisticated is actually and um and i hadn't seen that obviously before and that i think is is interesting the other thing the international flows which you just ran across very quickly yeah i think need to be a very important american political debate where we supposedly are exporting free speech at the same time that we're exporting the core mechanisms for uh the most effective filtering particularly for countries that didn't build filter systems and all they need to do is jerry right that's exactly right and you know one of the the sort of side projects here it's central to a lot of other people is the extent to which american and western technology companies that are multinationals are getting involved in this process getting sort of caught in the crosshairs of this process and one of the other things max others have worked on is the development of a set of principles that we've been seeking to work with google and yahoo and microsoft and vodafone on sort of based upon our data right now colin mcclay and john's position are in london hashing out some of those principles that's now a public process that we can talk about lots of good ngos at the table and so forth but i think that's a really important story in some cases it's a search engine that has some deleted results in the case of google some cases of somebody offering an application like microsoft that says you can't type democracy in the title of your blog post in other cases it's a us-based company accused of turning over information about journalists who gets thrown in jail in the yahoo case in other cases as people who are actually providing the software smart filter a secure computing product and a variety of others that actually end up doing it and sort of where on that continuum do you draw various ethical moral lines and so forth one of the aspects of this which i find fascinating and puzzling is that the the software wasn't only designed for repressive governments to block sites it's also designed for parents to limit access to the internet for their children and these strengths and limitations work just as well for the parent child relationship as it does to the government citizen and circumvention similarly though the circumvention tools that are used by people to get around the restrictions of repressive governments are the same circumvention tools that 12 year olds are going to be using to circumvent their parental controls which is also a mean a parallel argument is Cisco has been pulled into this net that they've been accused right from the start of selling the hardware that in fact China and others used as routers to carry this out but Cisco's response is look we were required to put in these surveillance tools because of Kaliya the communications assistance the law enforcement act for so the us fbi can listen in on this and it's the exact same technology so we end up seeing this kind of argument three cycle but um Ethan uh you probably have it as you okay has to go but you probably have a different view in terms of where we should spend our time thank you thank you thank you hi um as an activist as well as scholar and so forth you've had a different pushback to us not so much right longer and more contextual reports but rather um be more nimble or something well let's let me talk to the hard version here yeah um one of the things that's starting to happen around the world is that we're seeing blocks that aren't permanent aren't perpetual might just happen for a very short amount of time and um activists in these countries and not just activists but anyone who's trying to use the tools of free speech find themselves really sort of desperate for confirmation that they are in fact being censored and that they aren't in fact just dealing with a wonky corner of the internet um maybe the best example of this would be Ethiopia which has been extremely aggressive um at censoring citizen media and blogs where um reporters including a reporter for Reuters who lives in Ethiopia has called up Ethiopia telecom and has said are you blocking my blog no one in Ethiopia can access it and Ethiopia telecom has said no no no we're just really incompetent we have a hard time keeping a network up uh don't blame us you know we're just Ethiopians um and he's been really desperate to get confirmation that in fact etc the Ethiopian telecommunications company is blocking his and thousands of other blogs it's been really tough to get rapid response out of oh and i uh it's be frank it's been really tough to get you know mid-range response out of oh and i uh and this is a guy who's you know been willing to go and sort of run the tests and you know wants to get response on whether or not things are getting blocked what we're seeing from activists are activists writing their own tools uh and they're not as good as your tools they're not as good as oh and i tools but they're out there they're fast and so you've got astro ball in Tunisia running the four or three header checker and you've got you know great firewall in china running a site that we all know doesn't work but has gotten tremendous attention because people are really desperate to find out what's blocked and what's not so i think what's interesting is that by trying to do some of the stuff that yo hi is pushing for and get the really bulletproof contextualized highly accurate stuff oh and i has actually opened this sort of interest and this sort of marketplace for much less accurate tools um and for people to sort of come in and say well i want to know now whether this site is being blocked or not maybe i'm not going to have his definitive an answer maybe i won't have the same sort of context and the same sort of care in reporting it that i would get out of an oh and i report but at least i'll know now so that i can start rallying people to overcome this block um so i think that's the hard case i think the soft case says maybe there's a solution to this where oh and i does precisely what you were saying jp and just focuses on getting the data out there and then maybe does some of the really detailed high-level reporting on it on a longer scale but also makes it possible for other researchers out there to sort of use it on a shorter-term scale well what would if you could um describe what you think we ought to do in terms of empowering this kind of rapid response as we go forward knowing that we're kind of now we have a solid baseline we spent a lot of time and effort to get to this point what would you want to see oh and i able to do what kind of questions we want to answer and just before you answer i'll give you a second to think about it i know you know the answer but um with the i don't know 20 minutes or so we have left one of the things we'd love to get reactions to obviously questions about the data is great too but we are going to roll this out in a formal sense about a month from now at oxford everybody's most welcome if you happen to be an oxford or want to be an oxford on may the 18th um we'd love to get out you know what do you think are the most intriguing questions that we should be talking about based on these data what are what are the hard questions you're left with um and that as we sort of continue the conversation um which we'll put up on the conference wiki it'd be great to just as charlie is doing right now for the is 2k 7 conference about universities on may 31st what are those intriguing questions about the internet filter to kind of push the conversation ahead so right now there's often an experience that activists have where they try to work with o and i and say look i think i'm being blocked in my country can you confirm and the responses we'd love to take a look it's going to take a while uh we could really use your help help us run this tool um and then activists go out run the tool do queries using dig do queries that the real dig knock the dig dot com thing um and do trace routes do all sorts of things to sort of try to document and then the response frequently comes back from o and i is guys this is really complicated don't conclude that you're being blocked just based on that one thing that would be great would be a guide how do i figure out whether i'm being blocked or not you know there are some pretty clear indications nowadays there's a wonderful post on uh a lot of thought of the thought this site right now that gives pretty good evidence of dns poisoning and he's got a lovely little sort of one page how do you figure out if dns is being poisoned it would be great for you guys to be able to sort of hand that information back to activists and say okay here's a much more complicated process let's go through this in detail and let's determine whether there is in fact a good deal of evidence that you're being blocked does it come out of tools and handbook basically take the knowledge that you guys have developed over five years and pursue it not from the perspective of research scientists at harvard oxford cambridge u toronto but pursue it from the perspective of an ethiopian activist trying to figure out whether he's being blocked or not how do you walk someone through answering that question over five or ten pages if need be but answer it in some detail what did you guys learn in majoria it hasn't been q8 yet but i should i will tell you offline when we're not in this whole you know recorded way because i don't want to say it and then have it be wrong um but the the gist of ethans question is one of the things we've been trying to do is to try to make the these data more context relevant specific immediate um and uh one way to do that is figuring out whether or not internet is being blocked during election cycles one of our goals is that a few years from now the carter center or others when they go i see you go to do election monitoring they include internet filtering is one of the things that they do we've done it now three times in kyrgyzstan and belarus and now in nijriya this past week as you may have read that was a disaster of an election overall but the news wasn't bad put it that way in terms of the the internet um internet blockage and we and we think we've learned a lot in terms of being able to put tools in the hands of a gb researcher in this case um to uh to do that testing on the fly and uh rob and i have had some brief conversations about it but i think there's a lot of interesting uh data to be gathered analysis to come from looking at at these because as these countries start to realize that people can circumvent some of the technological measures that these other changes in third party liability criminal libel law um can have a very uh uh very pervasive effect throughout the country and accomplishing these objectives as well and uh i'd love to start combining our resources between the system and the law project and all and i to start to to look at these things more carefully and it may be first thing is to start to collect the data and and then start to draw some conclusions from it so this is in two joint missions but the human rights um clinic one to russia last year and one to um thailand uh another person southeast asia with clinical students to try to go and you know put together the kind of lawyer's set of uh research tools and um this we'd love to continue with the social media law project um for the benefit of sap who is the scribe of these questions can you put your statement into a question form in other words what is it that you would want to know or have discussed is there sort of a hard question buried there how are countries using their legal systems to effectuate these purposes apart from technological measures stephanie can we call on youtube give a brief reaction on this and something you've done i think some of the best work on uh with china or otherwise well yeah rob had a handy like graph that was sort of indicating that the level of rule of law in any given country is not just like correlated to like low levels of filtering so that's not really the factor that counts and so part of this would be also i mean it had a sort of normative question too because when you when you talk about over blocking and under blocking what it would be like the appropriate amount of blocking or in terms of like how would you define that normative standard and if a country has laws that enable that or authorize that does not make them valid in any way and does inquiry stop there and so countries like singapore that have very sophisticated experience with defamation suits um block maybe like a handful of sites and so that in malaysia as well so there are a number of countries where they where they've used all these controls would be like criminal liability it'd be making isp responsible for storing informational users and also reporting any kinds of um illegal activity um and it goes at every single level of output you consider the internet and usage there so uh be like licensing and registration requirements as well and so a lot of countries like even india where they only block maybe a dozen or a couple dozen sites that don't seem to have that much impact on the larger kind of flow of information um build in these clauses into their like isp licenses where they say um that are kind of what you consider maybe extra legal but on a contractual basis and so there's a lot to be done in terms of i think stephanie has done truly extraordinary work as we've written up this book in terms of trying to categorize these different kinds of controls and how a lot fits into it um i should note also that we've gotten a lot of pushback as we've circulated these drafts of the book um particularly by from jack goldsmith on the faculty here who's written a great book with tim who controls the internet um similar topic and his pushback basically is he's been really careful in how you describe this story from the perspective of the united states and from the west um and also recognize that control of the internet is um effectuated all the time particularly um uh by places like us that have extensive rule of law and though it might be normatively better um the space is highly regulated um and maybe even more so uh in the u.s. and figuring how to there's sort of apples to oranges there in in terms of some sense of trying to describe it um but to get um to get it right in terms of not writing a finger wagging book um about others but also um trying to draw some lines between um technical filtering and other kinds of filtering um has been a real challenge along the same lines one um offside way of uh filtering um and also another kind of layer of corporate complicity in the whole thing is with financial institutions um and how states can effectuate filtering through you know refusing not allowing financial institutions to charge for certain sites um well as one way even in the west how you can effectuate your a ban on internet gambling um just tell the credit card companies to not allow to have a relationship with these websites uh you didn't really cover that in this i thought you mentioned it in your chapter though how much does the book get into it and perhaps that's even one way of um achieving what professor goldsmith recommends yep that's a really good point can you just also for set benefit reframe that in the yes is covering the uh financial institutions complicity in filtering one way of achieving the two-way criticism that professor goldsmith recommends others that questions that come out of the so far reactions or whatever i have a question if we take the my question is beside like uh filtering and doing other research what kind of thing is the iron or dome to help the blogger or um or the website you know hold that like some tip so the fleet i went won't catch them because like i last week i saw in bbc they were giving some tip how to you know write some word differently so that the fleet i won't catch you so what kind of thing are it's an excellent question so i take your question at core to be what are we doing to help those who are blocked or perhaps those who are subject to surveillance be less blocked or less subject to surveillance presuming that we think generally it's a bad thing that there's blocking and surveillance going on um we've made a decision that may be the wrong decision but here at the repair center that that's that's not our business that we're not we're not in the sort of consulting frame nor in sort of going as far as advocating against these kinds of things at least yet that our first goal is to describe what's going on and try to put it in the context of the stuff that we know that's it we're sensitive to it and think it's important that somebody do it because many of us personally believe that people should be able to speak more freely and take advantage of the opportunities the internet and do so without being subject to surveillance turns out that some of our partners in the open industry do a lot more of this than we do the citizen lab for instance at the University of Toronto has built a tool called syphon which is one of these tools that allows you to circumvent the filters we're quite interested in studying those and trying to give advice on which of these work better than others but i also think it's to be a variant of Ethan's question which is while this is plainly relevant research to scholars of yokai bankler's caliber it is not always relevant research or as relevance it might be to people who are on the ground and they could be active political activists they could be activists but how can we kind of bridge that and i take that to be you know good and valid good and valid criticism and you know it's one that we struggle with always with this project um and from from what the oni is doing it's it's not to classify this top down but it really is like a localized group of people and Ethan i think the just your question is how to get you know some of those efforts out to the people who are directly affected by them uh and to get them involved into it yeah but that still leaves out the vast swath of the population who is neither at the Bergmas Centre nor you know blogging in Nigeria and i was wondering if if you guys are looking into tools uh network computing anything that would get the average user you know to to take part in checking on internet filtering worldwide definitely so the last two bullets of our thing up here i wish you'd obviously capture these effectively go to that question which is um do you think about sort of concentric circles right there's the paid researchers of the Bergmas Centre and our partners in the oni there's a group outside of that that are about who are volunteer activists who do some of the testing for us there's another ring that's sort of Ethan's ring i would call it which is sort of internet activist types vloggers and so forth they had you know rings in the consecutive center circles on um technically able likely to be able to do these things so forth the the next ring out is really um you know a broader group of people who have enough of an interest in this but are technically savvy nor paid so far um we have real designs for this crowd um uh i'd love to hear your thoughts on it but i'll throw out two things that we're doing one is as we read you the website we can show that again if you'd like is to have it try to make it more interactive so that there are ways that you can suggest sites that we will then test um we want to get more tools out to more people in in Ethan's way so that people can actually take the tools that our researchers use and run them and then get data back into a set that we can then QA but the sort of throwing the long ball version of this is is Jonathan's interest obsession which is to do a distributed application and the idea is sort of like study at home for those who know that project it was you could run a bit of code on your computer that would allow you to participate in a distributed research project or using some spare cycles um and so we've started the design on this we've started the design on this in a way that's um uh in line also with the stop bad work project which could have been sort of a distributed application um there people also want to do the same thing for net neutrality to have the same kind of application test for network packages um uh and changes in quality of service and so forth in terms of how packets go for it so we are totally totally interested in doing this but it is early early days Ethan a respectful pushback on setting at home right you can run setting at home in your machine but it doesn't sort of flash on your screen and say you've just found alien intelligence right i mean that that tossing job is left to seti because it's it's hard work it's heavy lifting you know figuring out that that this is not radio noise but this is in fact someone sending you the fibonacci sequence is not an easy thing to do um this model seems to go sort of in the same direction which is to say you can help us out by running this client on your machine you know on a particular isp in a potentially blocked nation but under current models you know we might let you know some months to come whether you're coming up with convincing data that's showing us that they're pushing back in the other direction the designs of the application are to do it in a way that gives them instant feedback both for stuff and we're to basically say on your pc you know what's going on right now could you just check in and see is something going wackily wrong like too many queries over here and that might map to this likewise with filtering to give you some sense of that likewise with um that neutrality are your packets going more slowly through of certain certain that would be great because we we've not done that very closely we have done that period next to you have follow-up yeah the the gimp's the great internet mercy prime search actually does alert you if you found something so i guess technology is there technology is there that's hours in the day it's more more than 10 um as you mentioned earlier there are quite a few emerging high-tech companies which provide uh filtering technologies to um these countries so um i think in the areas of company now people talk about the idea of corporate social responsibilities and people have been talking about this topic for decades um so company are required to uh are required to provide um um services or products which has um enough quality to protect consumer welfare or security companies should not um are carried out environmental pollution activities so i wonder whether the online reports deal with um the issue about corporate social response responsibilities um if so does the report uh kind of provide a definition of the social responsibility that should be imposed on high-tech companies or to what extent such kind of social responsibility should be imposed on the companies um chapters in the book does um jonathan's attorney of a chapter called reluctant to gatekeepers which is exactly on this topic i can be happy to send you the draft of it um as i mentioned before we've been involved for 18 months or so in a process once confidential now now public um we're a bunch of NGOs um as well as companies are getting together to figure out what does corporate social responsibility mean in this area there are at the table a bunch of institutional investors for instance which is sort of interesting in that way a bunch of people have done csr in other contexts um and uh literally at this moment when i mentioned that people are in london drafting this is quite a little late in the day but i have the last two days been updating the set of principles for what it what it means for these companies to um uh be acting in a in something appropriate manner and yes we're super imposing to some extent in our writings but we think that responsibility is and it's you know they're sure of a negotiation to say is there a possible way to make that into something like the solvent principles were um in the apartheid context in south africa have you said who those companies are just i'm sorry have you said who those companies are that are being microsoft yahoo and vodafone were the first four who are publicly out about it i think there are a couple more that will be will be or have been added but i don't know how if that's public or not so i will not say it on the webcast i'm wondering if we can get back to something that you mentioned really briefly which is how you release the the specific data say if i run a website and i want to know where i'm blocked around the world um there have to be a lot of nuances about releasing that data but it's obviously data that so many people would love to have so i'm not sure i have a well-formed question but what are some of the ways that that could be done or so here's one little application that's been developed and what's the website you'd be interested in oh i just know we're gonna get good results we know you're interested from that so we're messing with this and i'd love i'd love your input on it one one easy way to do it is the url for that available it's no it's not available okay it will be someday um basically we we have control you make it bigger the size of the case um so as we've been redoing the website um we've been trying to think about how do we do this in a way that allows individuals to get data that they ought to have access to and it makes it at least a little bit hard for the sensor wherever she may be out there in the world to get all of it all at once and then be able to use that block list in the censorship tool now maybe we shouldn't worry about this maybe you guys will say whatever you know it's just not that big a deal someone will get the block list um but uh we're struggling with it but i i could i guess i could see a situation where some country decides they want to they want to filter but they don't want to go to all the time we're just going to use china's we're just going to use whatever whatever china says isn't good we're going to say isn't good too the way that you you block uh email address we're kind of like china right yeah well one trend that appeared in a lot of countries including like china and oran which are some of the worst block filters is that it's very country specific content so it's in the local language um and it's relating to like like human rights issues or political opposition in those countries themselves so the blocking from the global list in those countries is a lot less expensive than those countries where you see a lot of social filtering based on pedography in those countries so it would be a little bit difficult for somebody to just take those from some of the worst filters like vietnam china i think it's a great question can you can you formulate into something that's used uh what kinds of methods or tools can we develop that will allow this data to be released in a way that individuals who need the data can use it but that it doesn't assist filtering practices by governments my other concern with this is also we don't want oh and i to be a clearinghouse for pornography and weird stuff like that you don't want to go to a place where something weird right yeah i would say this question oh i'm thinking about i guess i'm thinking of the story of filtering like over a timeline and so you've been collecting data for five years i'm wondering if that tells any story about about the kinds of like the kinds of filtering that you saw in year one versus year five and then how future data might tell a story about what are you know how with the release of this data set how well filtering change maybe in response to your data but maybe just because of new things that you're starting to catch that's great so a bunch of questions in there um the one is sort of the heisenberg you had the question of you know are we are we messing with the environments and we probably are but um in terms of comparing the 2002 data to the 2007 data it's not um we can't do that much of it to be truthful um it hasn't been collected in a stable enough way to allow longitudinal consideration saudi we've tested probably i guess four years you know in that period we've got a couple of states where we can do a pretty good job that but it really is about starting here and for the next four years we have a team together we're funding and so forth so the real question is um what do we want to know over time that we can use this um just kind of baseline uh as the starting point from it's a terrible formulation but you get the point right we have a baseline what do we want to know if i work in longitudinal sense do you have any guesses as to that or or hypotheses well in your bend diagram i just wonder if there's going to be more moving towards the center or some country if there's kind of two stories maybe some that never filter and start filtering or some start filtering but maybe toward and um or maybe there's a good story i'm not thinking of but but how in that diagram it's a great question one of the things that charlie nessen also suggested as the one of the themes of the book is what does the slope of the freedom curve look like in a given place but it's not so relevant that today somebody filters but are they getting more less frequent as a more open as an information brand we've we've set up a framework such that in future years when we test it'll be easier to track over time how these changes are occurring so we're considering that we do have to recognize our limitations in how we assess filtering and what the impact is the filtering of one website for another who have very very different publications the content of them will be very different they don't have a good analogy for it but like trying to compare the value of the information in one library versus another i mean there's such complexity in richard's there it's very difficult to condense it in some metrics but we're great for you so racy um so you mentioned that there are countries looking to join the club um filters how do you know who they are are they public about it saying yeah we're looking for debate in legislation many places around lat america there's a half a dozen countries uh debating legislation there's uh even the countries that filter there are proposals people put forward all the time increase the level of filtering united states is certainly one of the prime examples there as well as australia there's a in norway which is breathtaking and it's rough so there's many examples and is this filtering all legal where it's happening now that's the interesting question on the flip side of it which is the vast majority of these systems are not prescribed by law so it's hard to say that they're illegal but they're not necessarily described in the law in any way that one could then say this is it being carried out um almost nowhere i mean i don't know about filtering specific law that says this is exactly how we do it and hear the contours of it and hear the ways that you can push back on and so forth um so it's quite interesting on both sides of that which is maybe what happens is there's a backfill of legislation for those places that do i suspect that's unlikely but for the ones going forward is there such a thing as a good legitimate internet filtering process where you pass it through legislation you then have you know a appeals process and so forth you could undo it and what is i think is this legislation content restrictions like the author of internet makes something not feel legal or are they specific to filtering there's both there's both now guys has has stepped in he's alluding to you can often use existing law to justify filtering something is illegal less than one of the other interesting things that we can we see very briefly which we'll look at future is that there's kind of two regimes to to categorize things very roughly one is where someone within the government has the administrative capacity and power to just institute filtering and in that case is you receive a lot of filtering in those places where they debate it and there's executive legislative and judicial involvement in it the answer is usually some filtering but not as much and then there's other places where they just don't do anything and my feeling is they probably just haven't gotten around it yet i don't know if that's true we should let people go but um one last question thank you um it's the last word should you guys be helping people filter better so here's a question i mean um thailand blocks youtube right and and i think everyone understands that thailand isn't trying to block all of youtube they're trying to block a particularly offensive video um you guys could probably help them out and and could probably say uh guys you could be doing this much more responsibly here's a way to do this uh blocking via url or blocking via keyword rather than blocking via ip is that a direction that oh and i should be working a great question it's sort of our third to last bullet up there which is you know if we could think of filtering best practices should we publish them i'm suggesting going even further because it makes sense for you to literally be insulting to this answer you know i don't we should put this on our list of questions for future consideration too hard um now to answer but i did have the to me the most remarkable experience i've had in um doing this work uh a few weeks ago was invited by the uh u.s. state department to appear in the embassy of the u.s. embassy in thailand on a video conference from nine p.m. to nine uh 11 p.m. here and there in the morning um and sitting in the room on the panel which i didn't realize was the sensor the woman who is in charge of censorship in thailand and i had a two hour conversation with the sensor in thailand it was wonderful completely interesting and she was quite a fun about what they're doing and so forth um so i actually see more in our future of having conversations with her and you know the people who are actually doing it you know it's human beings we're trying to figure out how to do this and you'll believe it's appropriate and um you know as we try to get more policy relevant we should be in that conversation one way or the other how we comport ourselves and what we say and how far we go down the consulting road is in a different manner but but i think we should be i think we should be serious about this and open about it so you're open to consulting to the sensors but not to the people who are being blocked i just want to point out that the question is remarkably close to the google question which is it's exactly the google question but by the way i love bracy's question yeah the truth of the matter is of course as you know we consult to the people all the time in this context we do a lot of sharing of best practices in that context but we don't talk about that all that you know broadly in this kind of that's it so we we do i think we do our share on that um thank you guys very much for a great lunch thank you all