Washington — A leading advocacy group for Internet freedom is offering a user’s guide for tools to get around government censorship.
The authors of the Freedom House report said they surveyed hundreds of Internet users in four countries with extensive censorship to see what circumvention tools they use and what they need. The study also did technical evaluations of an array of circumvention tools.
The conclusion: No one tool is best for everyone. In fact, no one tool is always right for anyone. But different tools are particularly valuable in different circumstances. The report lays out ways to help people decide which ones make sense for them, depending on whether they are searching for or distributing information and what levels of privacy, security and speed they need.
The report authors and others spoke at an April 12 conference at Freedom House in Washington.
“What we would like to do through the report is encourage the adoption of a wider range of tools, not just one,” said Cormac Callanan, director of Aconite Internet Solutions in Ireland and one of the authors. “VPN [a virtual private network] might cause a problem [for censors] and might require a lot of resources from the state. But if you used some of the other tools during that period of time, you’re in a stronger position of bypassing those blocks. … You don’t just take one and use the same tool all the time. Use a variety of tools.”
Daniel Baer, a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state whose Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor provided the funding for the report, called circumvention tools a “central piece of the puzzle in terms of supporting digital activists and others who live in repressive and Internet-freedom-hostile environments.”
“As the Freedom House report makes clear, the question of access can never be divorced from the question of safety,” Baer said. “One of the things that we’re addressing now through our programming is the fact that as the censorship landscape is becoming more and more complex every day, and as governments get trickier about how they censor and spy — they’re not just using technical filters but actually tracking people or punishing them for what they do online — we’re trying to stay one step ahead of the game … by supporting a diverse set of tested circumvention tools with our funds, making it less likely that governments can block them or compromise them all in one go.”
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a February 15 speech, “The United States continues to help people in oppressive Internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers, and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online.” She said the State Department has spent more than $20 million on the effort and will spend an additional $25 million this year.
Robert Guerra, who heads Freedom House’s Global Internet Freedom Initiative, said what made this study notably different from other evaluations of circumvention tools was the survey of Internet users, about 100 in each of four countries studied. He said the idea was to find out how the tools are used and what gaps exist in protecting Internet users.
One surprising result: People were choosing speed over security. Some of the leading tools that people use to reach blocked sites, including Google Cache and Google Translate, weren’t meant for that purpose. They allow people to reach blocked sites but don’t provide the encryption to keep governments from knowing what information users are obtaining or transmitting.
“Circumvention is not security. Security, anonymity and privacy are important and do need to be addressed,” Callanan said. “For end users, we can only repeat that security is more than a single circumvention tool and that it becomes a way of life. It becomes recognizing your laptop, your anti-virus [software], your encrypted data, your communications channel, your circumvention tools, your plausible deniability that you were using any of these things when the heavy knock” — here he knocked three times on a table — “arrives on the door one night.”
Hein Dries-Ziekenheiner, head of a Dutch consulting company and another author of the study, warned that activists have to be vigilant no matter what tools they use on the Internet. “There is no silver bullet to replace freedom; there is none,” he said. “These tools can provide you with access, but they can’t provide you, necessarily, with full security. There are still going to be secret police. You are still going to be traceable, though your traffic will be encrypted. You’re still noticeable. You’ll still stand out on someone’s radar, maybe not for the content you’re accessing, because if it’s encrypted, they won’t know, but by using crypto, you still stand out.”
But there is safety in numbers, Callanan said: If four times as many people start using circumvention tools, the state security system has “four times the trouble. So in a sense, what we need to do is get everybody to use encryption, to get everybody to adopt a circumvention tool, and believe me, the technical headaches will become serious.”
The Freedom House report (PDF, 6MB) is available from Freedom House’s website.
