 So we're so glad to have you all and we're so happy to have John Penney present to us in today's auction series. John this year is a Berkman Center fellow. He's also a research fellow at the Monk Center at the University of Toronto as well as a PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University. He's here to talk about just a small piece of his work, the breadth of which focuses on privacy and security issues, censorship, and welcome John. First of all, I want to say thank you to the Berkman staff for helping me put this together including Dan, who I sent my slides to a bit late this morning, so thanks for putting that together. I also want to say that it really is an honor to be able to come to the Berkman Center, not just as a fellow, but also be able to come here and speak about internet censorship given the number of, you know, real luminaries that have done some work and taught us a lot about this space, many of whom are in the room today. And many of which who have previously sort of walked these hallowed and I guess carpeted hallways previously. So a bit of a quick background into this. This is actually some research that spun off my doctoral project which concerns regulatory chilling effects online and particularly looking at of course IP regulation, that sort of thing in relation to the internet. This started as sort of some background research that sort of framing some of that doctoral dissertation and project. And then when I got into some of the history, I found there's a lot of richness to it, a lot of layers, and I think it's actually maybe a project that I could sort of return to once I had the doctorate completed to pursue down the road. So what you'll be hearing today is some of my preliminary findings in some of that research and some very modest thoughts and some ideas that I've extrapolated from it. Now in terms of in full wars when having that you sort of in the title to remembrance of InfraWars Pass in relation to internet censorship, what do I mean by that? Well, I certainly don't mean Alex Jones and InfraWars.com more guns mean less crime. I'm thinking about it in terms. So if you came here looking for a tribute to Alex Jones, you're not gonna get it sadly disappointed. Everyone leaves the room. I'm thinking about in terms of information conflicts as between sort of nation-state. So conflicts between countries about information and typically these not all the time, but often these take the form of disagreements about global communications mediums because those are the mediums for which information is actually communicated around the world. So the research actually involves, the project itself involves three case studies. I'll be talking about two more in-depth here for a time purposes so we can have a bit of a discussion that involves the telegraph and some a disruption of the telegraph during its time radio jamming the post war period and third is actually involves a direct broadcast satellite disruption in the 1970s. And hopefully I can provide a few ideas or modest sort of lessons to extrapolate for people who work in the space of censorship resistance. But also some thoughts on global telecommunications technology and some of the patterns by which the international community deals with that kind of technology. So why might I want to present about this today? Why is this sort of important? Well, here's actually a headline from yesterday actually. So out of nowhere the Chinese government has started to jam radio signals sort of the BBC World Service in English within China. And it's first time they've done this since the Cold War. And so this is sort of headlines. So I will be talking about Cold War radio jamming a little bit later. So it's almost as if the Chinese government were giving me a shout out, if you will, before my talk. Maybe that's not something I should be bragging about. So maybe I'll move on from there, but what are a few other reasons? Well first, history and knowledge. You know, we're some researchers in here. It's important to get the history right. But there are a number of legal and policy questions that arise in this space. People who work in the field of sort of censorship resistance and people develop circumvention tools, for example, tools that allow citizens to circumvent national censorship regimes, often have a question as to whether people critique these these kinds of exercises or efforts as maybe being questionable under international law or illegitimate international law. There are questions about what role does cyber warfare play with respect to internet censorship? And those of us who work in this space, are there ways or some lessons that we can take from the past that lead to better outcomes? And I'll have, I certainly won't provide answers to all these questions, but maybe a few ideas on some of these points. But also there are some bigger questions. So about the fate of the internet as a technology itself the direction of broader censorship trends and the role of international institutions. So in recent years there have been a few really fantastic histories done. One done by Professor Richard John, Professor Columbia, which deals with sort of the national history of both the telegraph and the telephone, but really focuses on a national U.S. sort of base level. So it's a great history, but it leaves out some of the international aspect of some of that history. Another one in which you may be more familiar with is Professor Tim Wu's work, Master Switch, in which he tells us about or introduces us to this cycle within information industries within the United States. This seemingly, maybe inevitable, but seeming pattern within these industries to move from a pattern of openness and novelty toward centralization, monopolization, and closeness. And so the question that Professor Wu poses is, will this be the same for the internet? And one of the reasons that he gives that maybe it will be different for the internet is because of its differential internet and a sort of international character, if you will. So on the one hand, while if you look at technologies of the past, whether it be radio, spectrum, control, or the telegraph, you had national industries. Professor Wu talks about how Google and I guess Yahoo and Apple companies that sort of dominate this space are actually truly international in character. So a few of the things that I think that I'll be able to provide here is maybe a few additional pieces, not necessarily to answer the questions that Professor Wu poses, maybe a few additional puzzles to the piece as to how this international character, the internet, may or may not be a way for us out of this sort of cycle with respect to these kinds of technologies. And in fact, I'm going to be introducing and keep this in mind as I go through two of the case studies, a different kind of cycle. And it's related to the cycle that Professor Wu introduces, but it is different. And this is a cycle that I noticed within the case studies with respect to global telecommunications technologies on an international level and how they're dealt with in terms of international law and policy begins with sort of a period of novelty and consensus about it. So there's a great awe in understanding the capability of it. And there's consensus that becomes reflected in some of the laws that really actually promote and facilitate greater global communications. The consensus and it depends on the circumstance, how long it's usually a few years. And that breaks down into a period of international information conflict, where there's sort of a tendency towards states to aim to control the technology. And then we move into either kind of innovation, which we start the cycle very similar to the one that Professor Wu talks about, we have a new communication technology that comes along, we just sort of leave the one in the past, or there's a different path involving intervention. I'll talk a little bit a bit later about ways that maybe we are those interested in preserving sort of internet sort of freedom, some of the things that we can do in the space to prevent some of this conflict and control. So let's get at the case study. So the first has to do with telegraph cable cutting and censorship. So in the early 19th century, you had the development of the telegraph, but the 1850s, you had the first transatlantic cables laid down. And this by 1900, you really have a global communications network that's developed. We talk about an internet revolution, but really the telegraph fostered a global communications revolution. So the one hand, it fostered more communication between nation states. When you open channels of communication, it becomes more efficient. And there are some instances where crisis were avoided by way of telegraph communication. On the economic side, you really had a revolution in commerce and trade because the telegraph allowed for trading and other kinds of commerce to be planned in a more systematic way and more efficient way, and which really promoted greater trade around the world. So here's actually a visualization of the submarine cable network as of 1895. And the lines that you see on this map actually represent both land-based and submarine cables. And as you can see, it pretty much links the entire world, all the way from New Zealand down here at the bottom, all the way up to the west coast of Canada and the United States. So everywhere it's linked, you can see a few hubs in the network and I'll get to those in a moment because they become important as the network develops. But like all global communication networks or like all maybe networks, there were two important network vulnerabilities. The first were these hubs. And you can see Europe and in particular in Britain and parts areas in Britain, which various Western European powers had control over, which were key network hubs. And they become points of control over telegram communications. So here's actually a cable way station. So think of this if you want to think of for the computer scientists. Think about this as terms like a rotor within the telegraph network. So you had people sort of working in here. They would receive a telegram from a certain destination. You can see some of these are labeled. You've got Gibraltar. You've got Old Vigo. And then they would sort of based on the telegram, they would then send it off to its destination. These were around the world. And a lot of these were actually controlled by the British government, by virtue of the British Empire at this time. Later, when telegram surveillance and suppression becomes sort of proliferates during the First World War, you actually had people in these spaces surveying the telegraphs and suppressing them. And the people in there were called sensors. So that's where we get our name censorship today. So these become populated during the First War, beyond people just mechanically routing messages as they come through the cable way stations. The other vulnerability had to do with the cables themselves. They're very rudimentary. And now while submarine cables were actually a lot more secure as compared to as compared to LAN cables, if you had the right equipment, it was very easy to sever them. So this is a cross-section of one of the early submarine cables. It's a combination of some steel, some copper, and that sort of green substance you see in the middle there is an early rubber-like polymer at the origin in India called Gadaparchen. It was used in some of these early kinds of cables. So in response to some of these vulnerabilities, because there were these early conflicts like the crisis in 1885 where Russia, in order to isolate Britain during that crisis, severed a number of British cables, the international community came back with a very strong consensus. And the consensus was that we really want to facilitate global communications and protect this network. So you have a few key pieces of international law put in place. The 1875 Telegraph Convention finalized in St. Petersburg. And if you really go back and look at this, it really is idealistic compared to some of the things that we talked about today in relation to the Internet. You had codified in this document a universal right to communicate by Telegraph. It also had a mechanism to preserve and protect communications as they go through the network, including some of these network hubs. And that was the virtue of this notice. So if you were someone who wanted to suppress a cable that is prevented from continuing on to its destination, it had this mandatory notice requirement that you provide a notice to the sending party that you weren't passing on the Telegraph. And while there's some recognition of national security concerns, there was no exception to this notice requirement in the convention itself. There was no convention for national security concerns of states. There was no exception for cultural morality concerns. And in fact, there was also a provision that expressly encouraged and provided for encryption. So parties were encouraged to encrypt some of their messages at this time, which provided for a lot of privacy amongst the communications. In terms of cable severing, you had the 1884 Cable Convention, which was established, which prohibited any kind of cable severing and provided some remedies for both states and for non-governmental, both companies and organizations to seek redress if their cables were severed. However, just as a note there, there were no provisions concerning cable cutting during war, and that becomes important. So you had this early consensus, which leads to a legal framework internationally, both law and policy, which really promotes the technology and global communication, sort of like a golden era, if you will, of the Telegraph. And it becomes highly effective during peacetime. The problem is, as with many technologies, is that states are thinking about, well, how can we use this to our national interests? And Britain in particular is a key player, because a lot of the national and international infrastructure with respect to the submarine global network is owned and controlled by Britain. And they start realizing that if you have the Telegraph plus surveillance and control, it can lead to a bigger empire, both commercial advantage as well as national security advantage. But the problem is that they had tied their own hands by signing on to all these conventions. And to their credit, they realized that any kind of surveillance infrastructure they had built up at this point was probably illegal, and they actually ramp it down. Unfortunately, war becomes the way out. So there's a small amendment done in 1908 to their service regulations to the Telegraph convention. The record on really how this is done, no one really knows, sort of lost in the annals of history, but I suspect Britain is the party that's behind it. So in 1908, the service regulations are meant to add a national security exception. That is to say that if you have, if it would be dangerous to national security to provide notice to a sending party, if you decide to suppress a cable, then you don't have to send that notice. So as a result of this small exception added in 1908, during the war, it's interpreted as allowing sort of full scale kind of surveillance and suppression of notice without anyone. So what happens is, is during the First World War, and actually just a bit of history, that cable cutting is one of the first premeditated acts of the First World War to isolate Germany. A lot of its cables are severed by France and Germany across the Atlantic. During the war, you have a lot of wartime surveillance built up. So you have sensors populating these cable hubs. You have an entire infrastructure built up, including cryptology and cryptologists to be working on some of the cryptography being used by governments to maintain privacy in their messaging. And a lot of that wartime surveillance infrastructure later in peacetime becomes permanent. So in terms of the history, the cryptology school that had developed within the British government later becomes what we now have to note today as signal intelligence agencies like the GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters. So an interesting sort of history there, it's actually the telegraph surveillance that leads to what we view as signal intelligence today like the NSA and GCHQ. So we have this pattern, the consensus breaks down and you have a mess of both surveillance and control, which leads to paralysis in terms of international law. And really nothing is resolved. No one goes back to the table and tries to fix this wartime exception. And so parties and countries start going to other avenues for redress. You have some international litigation concerning cable cutting. It's largely unsuccessful, but in some instances, countries are shamed into paying. And nothing is really settled in terms of the principles involved other than the notion that cable communications between neutral countries, that is to say not engaged in hostilities, are invaluable. That is, you cannot sever those kinds of communications and cables. And that's codified in the Fourth Hague Convention in 1908. What restarts the cycle into our second case study is innovation. These questions are never settled because we move to a different kind of technology. First, we have the development of the wireless telegraph, which leads to development of radio, which is our second case study. So high frequency radio jamming in the post-war period is the sort of second example or case study that we'll look at. During the Second World War and in the post-war period, there are two big problems that the world community decides it needs to deal with. First is the problem of war propaganda and second is radio jamming during the Second World War. So if you think about Germany, one of the things that Germany deployed in the Second World was something called broadcast defense, where upon to promote, and not just Germany, but a number of countries both use war propaganda to promote the war effort and also jammed any international signals from crossing their borders to prevent citizens from getting any information about what really was going on beyond the war propaganda. So these were two problems that had to be dealt with. The solution, at least in the estimation of the world community at this time in the post-war period, is this technology. So around this time, shortwave radio starts to proliferate around the world, allowing for mass populations to receive high-frequency long-range radio communications across borders, but not just across borders, but across several countries beamed across Europe all the way to Russia and other parts of Asia. So this is a shortwave radio. And along with it, you have this strong consensus in the post-war period. This notion of a free-flow information paradigm is promoted by most other world's great powers. And it becomes recognized in a number of the key international documents at the time you see it in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ICCPR, as well as the UN's Declaration on Freedom of Information in 1946, which was actually issued in the very first session of the United Nations Assembly, in which it declares that free information is the foundation of all other human rights. And so you have, again, this sort of strong notion of consensus that's reflected in the international law, which, as we learn, actually promotes global communications at this time. And we really enter what I view as the golden age of radio. That is to say, there's actually no jamming in the post-war period of radio signals around the world. So to me, the golden age of radio is less about listening to Orphan Annie here in the 1940s. It's more about this. That is, consensus, and this is actually the first session of the UN Economic and Social Council. We have strong consensus about the importance of the free-flow information across borders. And it's reflected in the international law at the time. Unfortunately, that consensus, again, in terms of a pattern, it breaks down as countries start to realize the potential of the technology, including its threat in terms of their own stability and existence. So the Soviet Union views a lot of the radio signals that are now being beamed after the Second World War as a threat. And in 1948, the consensus breaks down. It begins to jam American and European radio signals, Voice of America, and radio for Europe. And they continue to do so for the better part of half a century, 40 years later. So again, you've got a consensus breakdown, which leads to Cold War information conflicts and a real messy situation. But the difference is, and there's some differences here as compared to the telegraph, in the sense that these information conflicts are fought not just on the battlefield, but also within international forums. And so the United States and its Western allies that are still promoting this notion of free-flow information, they continue to advocate for it amongst international institutions, rather than withdrawing from them. And that leads to a few different results. And one in particular I wanted to talk about, because we're talking a lot about the ITU today. But there's one program that the ITU implemented at this time that really gets very little coverage and attention. It's a very little scholarship actually done on it. And it was one that was implemented by the then enforcement arm and really at the time ineffectual, because the ITU is really an institution that's based on consensus. At this point, consensus is broken down. So really, there's not much the ITU can do about this breakdown in global communications and radio jamming going on. But a program that was implemented after lobbying from the United States and some of the Western allies, including the UK, Canada, and a few other countries. The IFRB, the International Frequency Registration Board, which is the enforcement arm of the ITU, implements a radio jamming monitoring program, which I think was really interesting and there's not much out there on it. So it was established in 1984 when radio jamming around the world is actually at record levels. So it's not just in Europe. So the Soviet Union, Eastern Bok Galleys are all jamming radio, but there's also radio jamming happening in other parts, including the Middle East, and it's spread to Asia as well at this point. It is a very sophisticated internationally coordinated, so the ITU is able to use its international sort of connections and also working with the Department of Commerce in the United States to coordinate this in place strategically around the world, radio finding and harmful minutes detectors around the world. And it's a very technically sophisticated program. And they issue reports and there's not just annual reports, but also sort of quarterly reports that are constantly going out, but more official reports are table in 85, 86, and 87. Here's actually an excerpt from one of the reports where it maps a number of the locations. It basically outed countries and provided a record of where some of the harmful jamming was located. And that includes the Soviet Union, Western Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc States, Iran, Eastern Europe, a number. So this is just one of the reports and there's a number of other smaller countries in other reports that were fingered and shamed as well. The actual impact of this program is pretty remarkable in the sense that following the reports jamming immediately came down significantly, especially in Eastern countries. Now Eastern Bloc countries in terms of allies in the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union continues to jam. It's really undeterred, but some of the smaller allies actually diminish a lot of their jamming at this point. So one thing to note is that blocking and jamming is actually very costly. And I think if we're to think of maybe the causality here, if there is any, the IFRB really added an international reputational cost to the process. And a lot of these smaller companies, sort of countries, didn't want to step into the big information conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, who were sort of battling it out of freedom of information versus the right to jam and sovereignty. So that's just a little bit about the IFV program and I'll come back to it later why I think it's important, but it provides a little bit of a different orientation for international institutions where you have a lack of consensus. The third case study and I won't be going too far in depth into it, so I'll get in a moment to some of the ideas or lessons that I've taken away from some of these case studies. But it relates to direct broadcast satellite television scrambling in the 1970s. And again this technology, communication satellite technology follows a very similar pattern internationally. It begins with sort of a golden period, a golden era, if you will, of novelty and consensus, sort of a real belief in the hope of communication satellite. It becomes reflected in treaties like the Treaty on Airspace 1967. That breaks down, however, as countries realize the invasive potential of the technology. And that really comes home to roost with the development of direct broadcast satellite television where you can have signals directly beamed into the homes of people within countries and nation states. And that leads to again a breakdown of consensus and internationally a number of ideas start being promoted. But one of the things that I want to note in terms of the international law and point, there's a consensus of international legal scholars at the time that the traditional arguments about national sovereignty, that is the right to censor as a state, are actually seen as not able to justify satellite scrambling and signals at this time. They had to come up with a new framework. And so new ideas are proposed, an idea of prior consent that is if you want to communicate across borders, you need to get the prior consent of the receiving nation. Luckily, the United States and other countries start advocating against it, still pushing free flow ideas. And so they're able to prevent that from gaining any traction internationally, even though there's a few resolutions that are passed on point, including something called a jammer's charter, something to justify radio jamming around the world, as well as scrambling of satellites. None of that really catches on. But again, you're ending up with the same kind of cycle of problematics. And maybe you could say the next significant technology that we have is the internet. So what are some of the lessons and implications that I've taken from some of these case studies? Now, if we can return to some sort of, I guess, smaller, not really smaller questions, but I think more practical international legal issues that come up, some policy and practical issues as well, and that we talked about in the beginning, in terms of people working in the space of censorship resistance, if you will. So it's often said that there really is an international legal impasse, or there's sort of an impasse under international law as to the legality or legitimacy of these kinds of programs, the idea of promoting and developing censorship circumvention tools by one state or by non-governmental organizations, and whether that really is legal and sound under international law. I would argue that if you go back and look at the history, and unfortunately international lawyers, and I can say this because I'm a lawyer, they're not really great on looking back at the history of the development of some of these international legal norms, but if you actually look back, you look at the documents which reflect the free-flow doctrine after the post-war period. If you look back at the Telegraph conventions and dealing with this notion of a universal right to communicate by Telegraph, and you look at some of the consensus about the justifications for satellite scrambling, that is to say that none of the sovereignty arguments to really justify it, there needed to be an additional framework proposed. I think there's a very reasonable and sound argument to say that censorship circumvention and the people working in the space are doing something that is actually entirely defensible under international law is entirely legitimate. So if you are someone who works on circumvention tools, and someone calls you an imperialist, we'll tell them that John Penny says they're wrong. Secondly, in terms of cases, I think the cases also suggest that censorship justifications historically are a lot more narrow than they're often articulated today. So, and I think a great example is the most important one that's often touted is the national security, and if you look back at the Telegraph and you look at the post-war period, those were much more narrow even in times of war in terms of the circumstances in which you could invoke national security to actually censor not just communications coming into your country, but across borders and to jam them as well. So a few sort of thoughts on the international law side of things. Secondly, there's this tendency amongst policy analysts working in this space about internet and sort of like policy and governance and cyber warfare, and I think unfortunately academics are starting to pick up in this language as well using cold war and war like analogies for understanding some of these challenges. And I think we really need to resist those kinds of analogies because historically it's the case that during war as opposed to peacetime that censors in states are it's much easier to justify censorship at war, and that's just a reality of the international legal and policy framework that's out there and that's really demonstrated by some of these case studies. So I think we ought to resist these because really it ends up in a space where we're more likely to lead to more international and internet censorship. Thirdly, one of the other lessons is that when you have this breakdown of consensus and a lot of uncertainty at the international level, parties start looking for redress in other venues, and that includes different kinds of national and international litigation, and there's a growth of international law and liability that's happening right now, and for those who are working in the space, they ought to be aware of this and the potential for some liabilities, even though I think international law, what people are doing for example in developing circumvention tools that are out there and working on censorship resistance, have a good defense on international law, they had to be aware of some of the developments, there's a case area there, but that could be an entire presentation onto itself in terms of the alien tort statute. Haystack being a very flawed circumvention tool that had been promoted, and some potential liabilities, i.e. if somebody who used maybe a citizen of Iran who used Haystack ends up getting caught, what are some potential liabilities for somebody who might develop such a technology? That's something to keep in mind because I think we're in this point of lack of consensus in relation to the internet, but finally let's finish with a few of these bigger questions about the fate of the internet. I don't have the answers for you, but maybe there's a few ideas that we can take away. Two says, will things be different this time? The cycle that he presents in terms of information, empires in relation to the internet, will things be different? Well my answer, like professor, was well I'm not really sure, but maybe what we can take at least away from some of these case studies, we can understand the cycle in relation to the international level. So where are we right now in terms of the internet? I think we've just finished, unfortunately, not to get dark about this, but the golden era of the internet, if you will. That is to say, and if you believe the testimony of FCC commissioner Roger McDowell, who just testified at Congress and said what this whole ITU and WCIT thing about in December is really about a breakdown of this consensus about even though you had censorship, it was sort of a hands-off approach by governments in terms of regulated on an international level. We've now left that consensus stage and we're moving towards a darker period of information conflict and a move towards greater control. And so I think that is really what the challenge is in relation to the International Telecommunications Union and the World Convention, so the World Conference on International Telecommunication just past December, which raised the hackles of a number of internet activists in evangelists like Vinton Surf that really opposed any greater or sort of this threat of an internet takeover coup by other countries via the ITU. So is this all necessarily dark? Not necessarily, but a few lessons that I would pitch to people who do care about the internet and some of these issues are this. So first of all, that information wars in the coming years will be fought not just in cyberspace and what we're seeing every single day with some of the offensive technological weapons and some back and forth between the United States and China and hacking and that sort of thing, but also importantly it'll be fought in these international forums. And so that means that for those both countries that care about international freedom and as well as activists, the key is not to just be negative about it, not to just withdraw from these international institutions, but continue to fight the battles for the free flow of information at that time. And one of the things that I noticed in relation to the discourse around the ITU was that the people were articulating or were basically defending the internet in entirely negative terms in the sense that they're saying the ITU should just keep its hands off the internet and stay away. The problem with that is if you entirely withdraw and provide no positive vision for the role that international institutions can play and if we believe the testimony of Roger McDowell at CC Commissioner that the ITU is actually very committed to redefining its role in relation to the internet in the coming years, the ITU is not going to go away. And if we withdraw, we're leaving it over to these censoring countries whether it's Russia, China, Iran, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, if we withdraw and leave these institutions to them then we're handing the keys over them in terms of the future international law and policy which I would argue and I've attempted to show with some of these case studies actually can have a positive role. And so I think the ITU, if you look at its history, is not all negative. I think it's right for us to say it should keep its hands off in terms of international governance, but when we have this breakdown and consensus, what is a role or we ought to articulate a vision that these international institutions can play in this space? And I think one of them can be this IFRB monitoring program. In a way, I view it as almost an early international precursor to modern efforts to map and visualize internet censorship around the world. So I think of it as sort of a precursor to the OpenNet initiative if you will, which was mapping the location of radio jammers around the world. So maybe a vision or role for the ITU today and tomorrow, given this lack of consensus, is an international governance, but it's persuaded to take on a role in relation to the internet that it took on with respect to radio jamming. That is to say maybe an IFRB or an ITU-backed international censorship monitor. So watching the watchers, monitoring the monitors again in a way that maybe could facilitate greater communications by the internet and maybe dissuade, maybe not China, maybe not Russia, maybe not the bigger companies like Iran that are committed to censorship, but smaller countries that can be shamed out of censorship, maybe a program like this could be the answer. So that's all I have to say on it. Thank you for listening very quietly during the presentation. And so I welcome any questions or comments on anything that I have to say. Thanks, guys. So do I just sort of... Ryan? So with this shaming aspect, given the fact that China, Iran, Russia have very well publicized and acknowledged censorship regimes on the internet, what are your concerns that rather than the benefit of some kind of shaming regime that in fact you have very public countries that can provide some kind of, I guess, political justification for these smaller countries to say, well, if China is doing it, if we do 75% of what they're doing, we're still better than them, so you have no right to go after us. So what do you think about that tension? So the idea that as long as you have certain countries like China and Iran, for example, that have very publicized, they're like, we're out there, we're censored the internet, we're not ashamed of it, so how might sort of a mapping program actually impact on it? I think it's a good question. I think maybe my answer is to look back at some of the history around the polo in terms of the radio jamming. And since then I think you had a similar dynamic. I mean, you had both the Soviet Union and its allies in the eastern block that were just very open about their jamming of radio signals within Europe as they enter both their countries in Eastern Europe but also the Soviet Union. But because of that sort of conflict between the West and the Soviet Union and its allies, I think there's a lot of other countries that had felt in their national interest to do some kinds of radio jamming. But once they were exposed, they didn't want to step in the middle of the giants. I think similarly today, while I don't think, I think we could map China's internet censorship regime in Iran and some of these countries to the cows come home and they're not going to be deterred. But there's going to be some smaller countries that once we add a international reputational cost. So think of like the open initiative with an international platform at the UN or something like that where you could table a report saying here is what these countries are doing and you have sort of an international way of shaming some of these countries. I think maybe history has shown it can have an impact on some countries. And I think part of this too is that I think some of the researchers and activists that work in the space, we focus too much on it. We spent a lot of time on China and Russia and Iran, these more sophisticated countries, the more sophisticated systems. I think it's better to focus sort of on a better result, better outcomes if we look at smaller countries that are doing internet censorship but are because they sort of have pay lip service to human rights and freedom of expression, they're more likely to relent if there's a little bit more international exposure for what they're doing. What extent are these conflicts caused by countries having different views of copyright or different views of libel? It seems like for instance if the U.S. had passed the social law last year then we would be put on the same list by other countries. Right, so maybe this is another reason to say how we're entering this sort of, this consensus that I talked about which I think is apparent internationally with respect to some of these communication technologies, it's breaking down internationally but also domestically, so I think maybe so. I think Twitter was forced to block certain tweets from Germany because there was a libel case in that country. I can't remember the details but I know there are well-publicized differences between libel laws in the U.S. and in England that leads to something being published here and not there. I'm just wondering to what extent is this the root of the problem you're talking about? No, I think that's definitely an important factor in it. Part of this pattern that you see with some of these technologies, it's where you move from sort of the golden era and I'm boring that actually line from Professor Wu who describes it in his cycle but I think what I'm talking about is a different kind of golden in terms of international consensus. Part of the reason why that breaks down is that each country, each nation starts thinking about its own national interests both internationally and domestically and on the one hand they say okay well we need to control and sort of rein in this technology domestically for these domestic interests. So in the sense this would be the IP industries for example copper realize that sort of thing. So it's a combination of countries and states realizing they've got to control the technology domestically but also realize I think for other countries it's more of an international threat. The interesting dynamic in the United States is that it promotes internet freedom abroad while at the same time attempting to pass something like SOPA at home. So it's sort of the Janice faced nature of the problem. I do remember a counter attack in Canada about 10 or 15 years ago which involved a murder case that could not be covered by Canadian news media under their laws while jury trials in progress while in the meantime it was being reported here and you know transferred over the internet. Right absolutely and I think part of this is you can't answer this puzzle the puzzle that you know that that Professor Wu has attempted to tackle and really his work is is a fantastic piece of history but I think you really need to also look at the international history and understand the ultimate trajectory of the internet and you have to look at both of these things. But are there like telecommunications platforms or technologies that don't follow your cycle and like why and if they if there are if you can think of an example or two like is there a reason you think they don't sort of match up to the way you've mapped out international consensus. I off the top of my head I don't know of any telecommunications technologies. I'd be open to I mean these are sort of the I focus on these because these were sort of three sort of examples where you actually had an international framework that resulted from sort of a promotion of these technologies internationally. I mean there's other kinds of telecommunications technologies like say telex and a few others that allowed for and even I mean wireless the wireless telegraph. So I talked a bit about the cable based telegraph the wireless telegraph I think is sort of in the middle and the way I guess if you're to look at that as a separate technology it may not follow the pattern because in ways it was a transitional technology where we're moving from the cable based land based submarine based telegraph towards radio technology and so you had the wireless telegraph which was still important during the First World War and the Second World War but by the second one you had actually radio technology and high frequency and you know shortwave radio develop and that becomes the real technology that the World Committee promotes and and focuses on. I'm just interested to know how much your research has touched on quantifying or qualifying what the actual positive impact of information access is or is it simply a background assumption that information is good Oh so am I being empirical what can I say my doctorate is empirical whether I mean this was more so my methodology here is mainly historical right and because that's really how the project began it was sort of a sort of a historical background to frame my my doctorate which actually looks at data and respect of regulatory chili effects online and so this was sort of just looking at a few other instances of other global communications technology and and some of the sort of the trends that I noticed as I got into the history as to whether I can I have data that shows you that in terms of positive outcomes in terms of greater global communications field facilitation not like hardcore data but I guess what I do is historical data in the sense that if you look at in terms of peace versus conflict the greatest periods of lack of hostility seem to be in these case studies where lack of war and is or in the times where you have greater communications and these technologies really being promoted and facilitated so in the post-war period you have no jamming whatsoever anywhere around the world and you also have this great consensus if you look at the period leading up to the first world war you get this great consensus about the importance of the telegraph and it's facilitating communications and commerce and a lack of war and that changes during the first world war and maybe it's a chicken egg egg chicken sort of thing correlation and causation but they seem to coexist and so maybe that's one bit of historical data that could offer you at least a nugget to answer your questions whether internet freedom can lead to better outcomes maybe. One thing I think you kind of leave out in your analysis and I know this certainly from the first the second and third case studies is the certainly from the US perspective the offensive nature of the communication method and its ability to cause political change democratization freedom I mean the golden age of radio that you're talking about was very very short the Soviet Union always controlled all domestic broadcasts it was only when the United States and Britain and then a couple of others decided that they would break that monopoly by broadcasting into the Soviet Union that they decided that gee you know setting up hundreds of jamming stations was worthwhile so I mean I'm saying there's there's an also and this is very true the internet there's sort of an offensive this will lead to a more democratic society that's great let's push this and then oftentimes the government say hey wait a second all these guys think that this is this great technology to get rid of us right we're going to start pushing back and we'll push back not only on the technology but at international forums about how it's defined right no I think that that's absolutely right and I think you certainly see that with what we talked about early interest is sort of like this dual faced policy that you have in the US government which on the one hand you've got you know greater control and clamping down on internet freedoms domestically but then promote you know the state department out there promoting international freedom read sort of internet freedom abroad I guess in terms of the the case studies that I've talked about I think what you talk about is exactly right I think it's sort of if I were to fit in into the cycle I would argue that it's around the time where you're right the golden era is very short-lived and it's usually what happens is you've got the introduction there's novelty about it it's capabilities but then countries start realizing it's it's a real threat especially once and I guess in your view out of the offensive capabilities of the communications maybe from a different angle of view it's just the ability to foster communications across borders and so that when they realize this they're like like you say it's much it's we can incur the cost of jamming this stuff because it really is a threat to you know so our you know communist program whatever it is whatever domestic or cultural gender they want to promote and so that's really when the consensus breaks down if you're right it's so I didn't mean to leave it out I guess I would just sort of come at it from a different sort of angle of view in the sense that it's part of the cycle in that it the history this is when the countries start to understand the true potential of the technology whether it's it's offensive or defensive capabilities and that's when you had the consensus breakdown um just going back to the shaming issue um and I I haven't studied the Cold War too much but my understanding then of those countries that you mentioned that was sort of in the middle yeah um and it being revealed that they were actually jamming when they were pretending they weren't do you feel that that um their reduction of jamming was was correlated with the um I guess the idea that they were playing with both the U.S. and Russia in terms of you know they were they're they're dancing between both of them in terms of getting benefits for appearing to be partnering with both and to do that behind closed doors it you know it worked but as soon as those doors were opened and it showed that they were they actually were jamming they were working with Russia than the U.S. and all the benefits and incentives that came with partnering with the U.S. were lost so really the shaming is tied with economic incentives the smaller countries um that's censor but pretend not the censor benefit from economic and political goodwill from countries like the U.S. and right and so on and so shaming them really is revealing um their alliances to to different things which then gets rid of those incentives so I guess it's not a question but it's it's what's behind that shame right what are the incentives and his incentives that are behind it right no no I think it's a it's a great point to make and in fact I mean I didn't talk about it but in the in the 1970s in response to direct broadcast satellite you've got this sort of additional movement that develops internationally so you've got you've got the west on the one hand and you know so the United States and its allies you've got Soviet Union and it's sort of a more censorship oriented and you know radio jamming and satellite scrambling sort of allies then you have a number of third world countries and it's it's it's it has a name it's called a third world movement basically where they say that you know we we we like communications technologies and we could benefit from greater access to it be it's sort of that north south east west had a concern and so it's it their goals are a little bit different but they oftentimes will sometimes ally with the United States to promote these kinds of technology sometimes they ally with the Soviet Union and promote regulation with respect to direct direct broadcast satellite unfortunately they fell to the side of more scrambling and jamming and censorship because they viewed dbs as being a direct threat to their culture and sovereignty so they look to the international forums as a means of regulating and promoting the news from the third world movement that actually proposed this idea of prior consent yeah there's a few countries so brazil and india i think guatemala was actually interestingly a prime mover with some of this stuff and you see a little bit of today with respect to the itu so the head of the itu actually i'm going to forget at the time my head but he in terms of where he's from you know he doesn't sort of swear allegiance to the west or the he sort of comes from a third sort of third world perspective in the sense that he he's concerned about greater access to ict for smaller countries and you know he doesn't want to take sides in the information wars that are happening but inevitably as being part of the itu he's finding himself a part of it in terms of the the first part of your question i think it's i think it's a good point in that you know maybe by providing greater shedding some more light on these practices you're removing those incentives and it's sort of those sort of like darker relationships or arrangements that are done you know without exposure and then once we provide some shaming it takes those incentives away i think on balance i would say that that you can justify it but maybe there would have to be a way of still finding those incentives in other ways so if we we say you know censorship is not really the way to do it we can help you with greater access to icts through other you know arms of the international law and policy apparatus is supposed to um um joining china and censoring along the way i hope this is very good instantly torey is from molly but he was educated in moscow okay oh red that's right that's right he had both of his degrees in moscow right there were two things well it's just as an existence theorem are their technologies which have in which countries have not um censored or maybe they're not along far enough in their cycles gps there are now several systems and so far do we that it's not it's different obviously because this doesn't have the same content right but nothing less and you can also look in the cold war and there were agreements in which states agreed not to censor content for example it's illegal to to block uh or to encrypt telemetry in the stark treaties and so far so his existence there was you can imagine agreements but i i was struck more by the point that you made in terms of your lessons for the internet which is don't take wartime as a normal or as the paradigm case because that's extremely important you know this imagery of the cold war going to the internet is a terrible imagery sanger made it made a mistake on this in his article in the new york times yesterday uh it's not a cold war chinese censorship goes up and down there are third party actors that play crucial roles not just governments well as as to whether the censorship goes up and down censorship in europe uh is i mean is the freedom internet freedom in europe is different than internet freedom here and it can go up and down so this variability means that there's much more room for negotiations for trying to work out norms for shaming some even if you can't shame all uh so i think that i thought the richness of your presentation came in in showing that uh this isn't a binary war non-war it's a non-war and therefore there's much more variability in it i think this is very important presentation thanks uh adam i already got you right so i guess some more people i was curious to hear a little bit more about the potential future role the itu and struck again by the similarity between the network and network node map you showed of submarine cables and what i imagine are virtually identical internet transmission line maps and so in addition to behavioral nudging from the itu i wonder especially in light of the third third world perspective the decision right if there might be a push to actually lay out um more infrastructure in an attempt to prevent there from being nationalizable choke points right right i mean even today i mean if you look at i mean how does china sensor the internet uh i mean we well i guess that's a whole other presentation um but you know it's really mapped in relation to the physical infrastructure of the internet within china right you got some major isps which are basically handle china net um a few the other major isps i think our research out there suggests that a lot of censorship is done at the as level the isp level through nds based on rotors edge rotors you know that they're handing a lot of the incoming upcoming sort of traffic in relation to china beyond the firewall but i think the firewall metaphor is a bad one i think panopticon i think jetcrandle is a better way of understanding it but you're right i think a lot of the stuff is related to the infrastructure physical infrastructure in the internet and if we can preserve um some aspects of um some greater sort of security towards communications and meet some of the concerns of um other countries that aren't really uh in this battle the same way china and other the countries are it's a lot more complex um some of those countries voted for the resolution that came out of the it in december they're not on board with censorship they don't really care about that's not that's not their battle they're more concerned about greater access they're less wealthy they're concerned about getting behind the it's the digital divide that we've been talking about since the 1990s so i think um for our purposes those of us who care about this i think our our war is not our battle or the what we want to advocate is not just um freedom and you know it's also understanding those concerns and trying to meet them in other ways so um we don't lose these institutions in these countries that are concerned about those problems so i think that's a great point sure is there any historical parallel with the it or its part of sexual organizations moving on that front as well like yes we're going to have these agreements about encryption and censorship but guess what we're also going to try to lay more cables so that we don't have as many choke points so there was a movement in the 1980s towards international right to communicate and it was really promoted within UNESCO by some of these countries but unfortunately became associated soviet union side and said oh this is great yeah right to communicate and they then took hold of the agenda and promoted it as another way of censoring you know so right to communicate includes the right to not communicate which means we can censor whatever the heck we want and it was basically hijacked so it was something exactly what you're talking about in the movement that began with concerns just about physical infrastructure for countries that want to be on board with communications and global communications technology it gets hijacked by the censors um within international institutions which then forces the other countries the united states who withdrew from UNESCO sort of withdrew funding said you know we don't want to get part of this and sort of the idea died so i think again that's so i think that might have been something what you're talking about unfortunately it got caught up caught up and died as a result of cold war information wars and conflicts thank you that was a great talk and i think each of us will bring away with her own thoughts mine comes i had some of the same responses that i did because it i thought to me the most important point was the role of language and language imagery culture and i thought for people who are interested one of i think the most important pieces written on this was by lauren nader an anthropologist many years ago who spent time at the pentagon showing how the language that came out of the pentagon created a culture whereby they diminished the negative hostile dangerous impact of what they were doing and i think this is very important to think about so again it was language but uh to show my fruity improved uh i was thinking about uh early childhood development and the three different technologies you elicit it and i thought okay let's look at the internet that's the only one that came out of DACA the federal government the national science foundation only let go within relative years do you think what we're seeing has any difference because it's the government that created this in a warlike atmosphere uh to deal with nuclear weapons and had its own culture and only later got turned over to the public much later and how would that affect uh those three the leaks among those three technologies that's a that's a great question um wow uh anyone got time to um we got another hour right almer so he's saying no no john sure no no i no i think it's a great point i mean i think it takes us back to some of the already great work that's been done i mean on the architecture of the internet as it was built what its original aims were for you know this that famous line about um you know the internet treats censorship as a problem and routes around it and then the answer to that is well what if um censorship is in the router right and that's sort of how um but i think uh you're right that are there things about the internet and this comes back to i think you think your question takes us full circle back to professor booze question is there something different about the internet its origins its original purpose its architecture that leads to a different outcome here i really hope so um but i'm not sure i have the answer um it might be that um it certainly has a kind i think of dynamism and flexibility that certainly the telegraph didn't just where you could sever um and you could you had these cableway stations that are you know easy to deal with but that was sort of internationally controlled by one country basically britain really own that infrastructure um you don't have that with the internet right china owns its infrastructure but it doesn't own um everyone else's so maybe there's aspects of the global internet network or the of the internet that are different um but i think yeah i mean it's it's a great question uh do i feel well i have to say uh that you know in terms of the you know professor booze cycle um and uh you know i i guess i i thought that some of the insights here are a little bit dark uh in the sense that it seems like we've just left the golden era if you will if this there is a cycle internationally and there's there seems to be a bit of it at least with some technologies and kender's point out there's probably other technologies that don't fit it um i don't know if it's as inevitable as as professor would say about his cycle um but i think there's certainly uh the fact that we're now entering a even though we've had internet censorship we've had it for a while and now we're entering a space where there's even going to be more potentially more control so some dark and i think the point is that we need to think critically about it understand the richness and the complexity of the problems and tackle it that way um maybe one more question general um yeah so thanks for the very cool talk um so when i was uh hearing about your your historical scenarios and the trends in them i was i was thinking about the very strong power that popped up in my mind is basically the case of international trade right which is basically the same thing in the sense that you've got a consensus everybody agrees that trading with one another is good so everybody benefits from it right but each and every time you get a moment of tension internationally then people start to think and realize well if everybody cooperates but i don't i get an even larger part of the case right um and so one thing that goes back to your shaming point is that something that has been really efficient at certain conventions and you see that right now in this financial crisis is international structures for people to talk to each other and reveal the information so that everybody knows what's going on right right which is basically the wto right um so that sounds to me like a very like striking parallel between communication technologies and international trade in the way it works um but i guess my my point is is different i'm worried that you know in in in this circle that you described i'm worrying about the role of conflict actually because if you think about it we leave right now in a world in which the number of conflicts worldwide is decreasing dramatically over the past 15 years which is a fact um even in in this financial crisis we have like very high growth rates worldwide right so why would it be on earth that would trigger a breakdown in the consensus but the lack of coordination institutions like powerful like the wto and i find this worrisome in some respect so with you not i mean i i i agree with you i think well first of all on your first point i think that's a great parallel and that you know this idea that opening up channels of information and exposing it maybe that's kind of like the shaming point but i think it's a maybe another way that we could build out a different kind of resolution to some of these problems of censorship where you have different channels of communication information so the countries that have some concerns there's a different outlet for them internationally so that's one side of it secondly um you're right i i think there are some concerns um in terms of you know why might we in terms of conflict i think inevitably and maybe that's why there is seemingly this cycle that while you start off with a uh technology which everyone for a short very small period of time with a global area the golden era is always short because it's very quickly countries start thinking about them in terms of their national interests both in terms of the threat to the technology poses and how they can it's offensive technologies how can you actually gain this to your own commercial or national security advantage and then you look at that both in relation to the internet and the telegraph with britain and that sort of thing so you're right i mean that's maybe the darker side of this this cycle is that maybe you were inevitably why wouldn't there be any kind of conflict given the collective action sort of issues and some of the concerns so it's it's a good one i think we can wrap that up so thanks a lot guys for the great questions and patiently listening