Internet censorship
What would you think if you searched the Internet after the Canadian federal budget is presented tomorrow and every article you could find about it was positive? How would you feel if you attempted to visit the blog of an outspoken critic and the site was suddenly gone?
More than 2000 years ago the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote about controlling and manipulating information. Politicians, military leaders and advertising agencies (to name just a few) have spent much of the time since refining their techniques. For example, during the cold war, nations such as the Soviet Union and East Germany used high-power transmitters to jam western radio and television broadcasts to prevent their citizens from watching and listening to them. At the same time, western countries used shortwave radio stations to broadcast programming specifically intended for the eastern audiences.
While radio frequency jamming continues in some parts of the world, the battle is now mostly online. Canadians can fairly expect to read all sorts of opinions on the budget but citizens of some other countries, notably China, aren’t so fortunate: Their government operates extensive filters in an ongoing attempt to suppress opposing viewpoints.
Other countries are more subtle. For example, at last report Australia was still moving forward with its “Clean Feed” project, which would require Australian Internet Service Providers to implement mandatory filtering. The filter was initially touted as a “cyber-safety” measure for homes with children. However, according to Electronic Frontiers Australia, “Recent comments by experts have revealed the existence of a second, secret black list that would apply even to homes that managed to opt out of the child-safe filtering scheme.”
The problem with all these schemes is who gets to decide what content is filtered and how the decision is made. Child pornography is universally unacceptable and proponents of filtering thus often use it as an example and a justification. Material such as hardcore pornography, information on how to make bombs and the words of those who propose policies such as genocide also have few public defenders. Then there’s nudity and violence. Some people find nudity offensive in itself, while others perceive the human body as beautiful. Some parents allow their young children to watch violent cartoons while others hope to never expose them to Elmer Fudd, the madman with the shotgun, or Wile E. Coyote and his nasty dynamite habit.
Government-imposed or Government-controlled Internet censorship is extremely dangerous. Once filters are implemented, politicians and bureaucrats will be under constant pressure by special interest groups to block additional content. Adding a Web site to the blacklist will always be a safer political decision than not adding it. Pornography will be first because very few people are willing to publically support it, followed shortly by any form of nudity. Religious groups will quickly organize and apply massive pressure to censor Web sites about abortion, contraception, homosexuality or that dare question the existence of God. You might disagree, and perhaps you personally might have the courage to stand fast against such groups. Now put the same decision into the hands of a group of people concerned about being re-elected and see how quickly the blacklist grows.
Of course once the filters are in place, there will be other uses for them. Fighting with terrorists? Block their Web sites to protect your citizens. Find complaints about the goings on in Gaza politically costly? Just flip the switch. Let there be no misunderstanding: These filters allow Governments to choose what we can and cannot read, to curb discussion and to silence dissent. And, no matter how noble the initial intent may be, they will be abused.
On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 reads:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
Whatever we think of the UN’s effectiveness today, the fact remains that, a few years after the end of the Second World War, a majority of the countries around the world saw fit to include this principle alongside other fundamental human rights. We must not allow short-sighted politicians to take this right away.
Obama and his BlackBerry
The Messaging and Mobile Media division of VeriSign is estimating a record 1.4 billion mobile messages will be sent on Inauguration Day. But President Barack Obama probably won’t be sending or receiving any of them. At least, not on Inauguration Day.
Obama and his Blackberry on the campaign trail.
There has been an onslaught of articles posing questions such as, “Is the BlackBerry secure” and probing issues like access to the President’s email. But there are much larger issues here.
As a Canadian, I have only a passing familiarity with the American legal system, so I won’t pretend to understand issues related to congressional access to Presidential email. However, if the President of the United States doesn’t have the right to exchange private personal emails with friends and family, something is seriously wrong and it is not a technical problem.
In attempts to explain the security properties of most email, many have written that email is like sending a postcard. In reality, it’ s worse. It is unlikely that someone working at a postal sorting facility could automatically copy every post card flowing through the system and walk out with it at the end of the day. Sadly, that’s all too easy with email. While larger ISPs have internal security and privacy processes in place, it still remains trivial to intercept copies of email, especially in the case of smaller Internet service providers. Email also leaves another trail: Virtually every mail server maintains a log file that shows the source and destination of every email message that passed through it.
The impact of this issue depends largely upon who you are. I, for one, would be flattered to hear that thousands of system administrators across the world searched their mail logs for my email address. However, such searches are guaranteed to happen within minutes of President Obama’s email address becoming known and the mere fact that Obama sent someone an email makes them interesting. Interesting enough that at least some system administrators will open the mailbox to have a look. And interesting enough that a number of organizations, both domestic and foreign, would be happy to pay for it.
The underlying issue is that, while the technology required to secure our email has existed for almost two decades, we don’t use it. Tools like PGP and the S/MIME capability built-in to Outlook are relatively easy to use but only an infinitesimally small number of people use them. And ask them what percentage of their total email is protected and you’ll quickly hear that most of their friends don’t have the capability to exchange encrypted email.
Yes, there are some issues with the BlackBerry, most notably that the encryption technology used in the device should be improved. But we need to keep the vulnerabilities in perspective. For most of us, our BlackBerry is not the weak link because intercepting the data and decrypting it is expensive, complicated and illegal. On the other hand, I would expect at least a dozen countries to spare no expense to monitor the President’s personal email. Put in security terms, few of us face a threat agent with sufficient resources and motivation to intercept the radio communications to and from our BlackBerry and break the cryptography. But the President does and the beauty of intercepting radio waves is that nobody can see you do it. While personal emails may be benign, they can give some insight into what a leader is thinking, what other people are telling him and who his friends are.
Other issues exist, including the fact that any mobile phone, BlackBerry or otherwise, can be used to tell where someone is located when it is turned on. I won’t repeat the countless scenarios that people are posting to the net. They don’t matter. We already know where the President is. Anyone who needs his BlackBerry signal to find the Presidential motorcade isn’t much of a threat. And, after all, the devices do have an off switch.
But there’s another force at play that has nothing to do with security. Obama’s BlackBerry provides him with a direct path to the Internet that bypasses his advisors. Email, web, and telephone that they don’t screen or control. Just imagine the President asking a friend, former senate colleague, or anyone else for their opinion via email or instant messenger. This type of connectivity has the potential to change the White House and I’m sure that at least some people don’t like that.
I hope that President Obama keeps his BlackBerry. Ensuring that the President remains plugged in is a good thing. I also hope he assigns someone a new job: Fix email security. While few of us face the same threats as the President, given the economic climate and widespread economic and industrial espionage facing virtually all developed countries, we would all benefit from more secure email. I also hope that Canadian-based Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, seizes the opportunity to increase the security provided by their products. We’ll all benefit from that, as well.
Backups: A resolution you can keep
Most of us have come to rely upon the information on our hard drives. Email, calendars, contacts, family photos, financial information, our music collections, and so much more. So as we begin another new year, let’s take a moment to consider if our information is adequately protected.
Here’s a simple test for home and small business users: Shut off your computer and pretend it is gone. What have you lost? Do you still have your grandmother’s address? Your MP3 collection? Your family photos? Can you pull out a DVD and access the data from another computer, or would you be frantically trying to find someone who does forensic data recovery?
While hard drives have become much more reliable, they do fail. Computers also get stolen and infected with nasty viruses that destroy information. It’s sad to think that while some of this generation’s special moments could live forever in electronic form, some won’t survive longer than their owner’s hard drive – about five years on average.
So what are your best options?
Most computers sold these days come with a DVD writer, and if yours didn’t, you can buy a USB DVD writer for about $100. I’m a huge fan of DVD media because it is has become dirt cheap and if you choose standard DVD-R or DVD+R media, once it is written it can’t be accidentally modified. (I advise people to avoid RW media for backups – using media that can be overwritten defeats one of the biggest advantages of using DVDs in the first place.) I burn all my original photos to DVD. But there is a disadvantage: We really don’t know how long they will last. Our best estimate at this point is that quality media will last about 50 years. Of course within about 10 years we’ll probably be able to copy all of our old DVDs onto some new disk, so as long as we keep that in mind, we’ll be fine.
Another great option is a USB hard drive, just connect it to your computer, copy your files onto it (either manually or using backup software), and then, most importantly, disconnect it and put it somewhere safe. While today’s high capability USB drives make it an attractive option, there’s one catch: Many people have lost data when a “bad†copy of a file is copied over the “good†one on the backup. For example, if a virus corrupted a few thousand of my digital photos, and my only backup scheme was to copy them to a USB hard drive, I might end up copying the corrupted versions over top of the good versions. And that defeats the whole purpose. So while USB hard drives can be great, you might want to use backup software that keeps older versions of files.
Of course you can combine these two options into a rock solid backup system – burn important files to DVD and also back up your system to a USB hard drive. Some people also create a second DVD and store it at an off-site location to protect their data in the event of flooding, fire, or natural disaster. But what about those of us who “know†we should back up our files, but never seem to get around to it?
Several companies offer automated Internet-based backups. For example, you might have seen the Carbonite ads on this web site. Carbonite is one of the leading Internet backup services because it’s very simple to use: You install their software, tell it what files or directories you want backed up, and for about $50 per year you can have your computer automatically back up your important files across the Internet. Network-based backups take longer, both for the backup and subsequent recovery. But if you want something completely automatic that runs in the background, this is it.
More technical users looking for Internet-based backup should also check out JungleDisk and the Amazon S3 service. In summary, you can open an account with Amazon and get access to data storage for $0.15 per GIG per month, plus some data transfer fees. JungleDisk ($20) allows you to mount S3 storage space as a drive letter and it also provides backup functionality.
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