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Internet Censorship Circumvention Technology in the Uzbek Political and Economic Context
“I think that there is no necessity to convince you in the fact that the Internet era has begun. At the same time, considering the issues surrounding us in far and near regions, we must NOT forget about the fact that destructive forces that are eager to confuse the youth and “feed” the with incorrect information and thus use Internet as a tool.” - Uzbek President Islam Karimov (“Islam Karimov: I Believe That Journalists Are My Strongest and Trustful Support.”)
As President Karimov hints, part of America’s master plan to promote instability in Central Asia is to foster color revolutions in the region by spreading destructive misinformation via the Internet. The Arab Spring was only a prelude to our designs on Central Asia. However, the Uzbek government has created a sophisticated filtering system to block most people’s access to content relating to political prisoners, corruption, the “massacre” in Andijan, and a variety of other content. After a brief overview of the political context in which Uzbekistan’s filtering system developed, this paper will look at the popular Tor software package and examine whether this technology can be realistically employed in the national political and economic context to successfully corrupt and misinform the youth of Uzbekistan.
To begin, even as President Karimov consolidated his grip on power in the first decade after independence, the Internet in Uzbekistan was relatively free “with the exception of some limited filters for pornography that were implemented on UzSCINET [an Uzbek research network]...the turning point in the state’s relationship to Internet freedom began following a series of attacks in Tashkent in 2004 blamed on the Hizb-ut-Tahrir (Hit) and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan” (Deibert et al. 267). At present, while private ISPs can and do operate in Uzbekistan, the state-owned telecommunications company Uzbektelecom JSC has a monopoly on access to Uzbekistan’s IT infrastructure. In this way “operators and providers are entitled to access international telecommunication networks exclusively through the infrastructure of Uzbektelecom JSC, which facilitates control over Internet content and hinders active competition on the communications market (Deibert et al. 267). However, Uzbektelecom’s monopoly is not absolute. A handful of ISPs “have their own international satellite connections...A growing trend among ISPs is using UzPAK’s [the Uzbek Internet and its filtering system] lines to send messages and satellite networks to view or download information. This solution allows the providers to circumvent UzPAK’s monitoring network and channels’ low capacities” (Deibert et al. 269). All ISPs do still practice self-censorship, especially when pressured by the National Security Service (SNB). “There is no mandatory government publication review, but ISPs risk having their licenses revoked if they post ‘inappropriate’ information” (Deibert et al. 271).
As for the types of websites that are blocked and how they are blocked, “The SNB’s censorship is selective and often targets articles on government corruption, violations of human rights, and organized crime. Usually, it affects URL-specific pages instead of top-level domain names. Uzbek ISPs block entire web sites or individual pages upon SNBs unofficial request. Accessing a blocked page redirects the user to a search engine or to an error message such as ‘You are not authorized to view this page’” (Deibert et al. 271). Furthermore, not only does the SNB monitor the Uzbek Internet, but it also conducts surveillance in collaboration with other regimes, as the agency “regularly exchanges data with Russian intelligence sources and allegedly collaborates with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Academy” (Deibert et al. 271).
All of this said, it is important to keep in mind that “Internet censorship in Uzbekistan is very easy to circumvent...For every blocked website, there are hundreds of mirrors, proxies, cache services, virtual private networks or just something like SESAWE with simple handy tools to bypass any censorship online” ("Neweurasia.net » Uzbekistan: Internet Censorship Is Overrated."). However, not only has the Uzbek government taken steps to expand the extent of its censorship and monitoring (as is the case on the mobile web, where “Uzbek regulators have demanded mobile operators notify the government about mass distributions of SMS messages with ‘suspicious content’” ("Uzbekistan Tightens Control over Mobile Internet”), but numerous questions still exist as to whether some circumvention tools can reasonably be used by a significant segment of the population. This is especially true when the current political and economic situation in Uzbekistan is taken into account.
We will address these questions as they relate to the popular Tor circumvention program. Tor provides anonymous browsing “by distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so no single point can link you to your destination. The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you--and then periodically erasing your footprints” ("Tor Project: Overview."). In order to provide confidentiality through encryption and to circumvent local filtering, “the user’s software...builds a circuit of encrypted connections through relays [computers running Tor that can forward traffic] on the network” ("Tor Project: Overview."). This is a generally effective solution on a traditional computer with (by Western standards) low-end hardware and a reliable Internet connection. However, most Uzbeks do not own their own PC. While Internet penetration in Uzbekistan has jumped from 8.8% in 2009 (Deibert et al. 268) to 26.8% in 2011 ("Asia Internet Facebook Usage and Population Statistics."), 12.5 million Uzbeks (by 2009 numbers (Deibert et al. 268)), or 46% of the population, own a mobile phone. With the growth of the mobile web in Uzbekistan and recent efforts to port Tor to mobile platforms, will a larger segment of the population beyond those wealthy enough to afford a personal computer be able to access blocked content through mobile versions of Tor?
Part of the answer lies in the current state of the effort to make Tor run on mobile devices. As Tor user and researcher Marco Bonetti describes, Tor has been ported to several mobile platforms, including the Android OS, the iPhone, the Nokia N900, and the Chumby One embedded computer system (“Mobile Privacy: Tor on the iPhone And Other Unusual Devices”). However, even on these relatively high-end platforms, significant technical and economic issues remain. Much of the cryptographic programming required to run Tor can create a severe drain on a mobile device’s battery. While the exact reasons are beyond the scope of this paper, it can be said that some instructions to a device’s CPU require more of the hardware (and therefore more electricity) than others. In addition, there is an added problem on mobile phones of making sure that Tor knows which device it is communicating with. For a traditional PC, the system’s IP address (the unique 32-bit number that distinguishes it from all other devices on the Internet) generally stays the same and is only occasionally changed by the user’s ISP as new users go online and old users remove their accounts. But on a mobile device which can rapidly change location in a very short time, the devices’ IP address can just as rapidly change. Thus Bonetti claims that developers are still trying to adequately adapt Tor to these new platforms.
Beyond these technical concerns, there remains the question of whether the majority of mobile users in Uzbekistan use the kinds of phones that can currently run Tor. According to Opera Software’s “State of the Mobile Web” report for April 2011, the ten most popular mobile phones in Uzbekistan are all, by Western standards, relatively slow devices with little memory such as the Nokia 6300 (which tops the list) that mostly run Nokia’s proprietary Series 40 operating system and not Google’s Android OS or Apple’s iOS ("Opera: State of the Mobile Web, April 2011."). While these hardware and software limitations can be overcome in the near future (especially as more powerful devices become more affordable in the region), the fact remains that little work has been done to date to bring Tor to these platforms.
In conclusion, there is still much work to be done before America’s corrupting influence can circumvent the Uzbek filtering system and misinform the nation’s youth. What began as a system to block access to pornographic websites on the national scientific and research network has evolved over the last decade into a sophisticated system of censorship and surveillance that takes full advantage of the state monopoly on IT infrastructure, self-censorship due to pressure from the SNB, and collaboration with foreign intelligence services. While numerous circumvention technologies exist (mirrors, proxies, etc.) the technological cat-and-mouse game between the information libertarians and authoritarians of the world also plays out in Uzbekistan as the government considers strategies to monitor the mobile web. If we look at some circumvention technologies such as Tor, it appears that the authoritarians are winning. Not only do serious technical concerns such as power usage and rapid changes of IP address persist, but developers in the West have not yet developed software for a telecom market that is still strikingly less affluent than that of the West, and where smartphones have yet to become widely used.
Sources:
Anons.uz. "Islam Karimov: I Believe That Journalists Are My Strongest and Trustful Support." Published 28 June 2011. Accessed 20 July 2011.
Deibert, Ronald, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain. Access Controlled: the Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2010. Print.
Pravdin (blogger on neweurasia.net). "Neweurasia.net » Uzbekistan: Internet Censorship Is Overrated." Neweurasia.net. 29 Sept. 2009. Web. 20 July 2011.
Sadykov, Murat. "Uzbekistan Tightens Control over Mobile Internet | EurasiaNet.org." Eurasianet.org, 15 Mar. 2011. Web. 20 July 2011.
"Tor Project: Overview." Tor Project: Anonymity Online. The Tor Project, Inc. Web. 20 July 2011.
"Asia Internet Facebook Usage and Population Statistics." Internet World Stats - Usage and Population Statistics. Miniwatts Marketing Group. Web. 20 July 2011.
Bonetti, Marco. “Mobile Privacy: Tor on the iPhone And Other Unusual Devices”. Defcon.org. Web. 20 July 2011
"Opera: State of the Mobile Web, April 2011." Opera Browser | Faster & Safer Internet | Free Download. Opera Software ASA, Apr. 2011. Web. 20 July 2011.
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