Evasion Tactics

The number of countries that censor and monitor their citizens’ use of the Internet is increasing. While it is no secret that China and Iran censor the Internet, at least 25 countries, including Pakistan, Ethiopia, Thailand and Uzbekistan, also have technical filtering regimes in place. Some of the technology is even exported by western companies: search engines, blog hosting providers and email providers have extended their existing filtering mechanisms – which usually target pornography and copyright infringement – to censor political content and gain access to lucrative markets in repressive countries. Censorship and surveillance is not restricted to authoritarian regimes. The technology used to censor the Internet in entire countries in the Middle East and North Africa also filters access in schools and libraries in North America. An Internet service provider (ISP) in Canada blocked access to a website set up by members of its workers’ union during a labour dispute. ISPs in the United States have implemented a sophisticated, and illegal, monitoring and data-mining programme, covering both Internet and telephone communications, at the behest of the National Security Agency. The problem is magnified when the concept of censorship is extended beyond just the technical aspects of filtering web content and Internet services. There is, however, a growing resistance to Internet censorship and surveillance, although it is often characterised as a struggle confined to dissidents in a few select authoritarian regimes. There are a wide variety of awareness raising campaigns as well as academic research projects aimed at exposing and confronting censorship. Legal battles are being fought all over the globe, while the development and use of technologies that protect privacy and make it possible to circumvent censorship are rapidly increasing. The same tools helping dissidents to evade censorship in repressive countries are also being used by citizens in democratic countries – to protect themselves from unwarranted Internet surveillance. There are three key factors to Internet censorship. First, there are formal and informal mechanisms, including laws, licensing and self-regulation, that act to create the legal, and often extra-legal, framework within which Internet censorship takes place. Second, there are a variety of technical methods