John Palfrey

This morning — at the Summer Doctoral Program in Cambridge, MA — we’re taking up the topic of Internet filtering and the work of the ONI (and what we’ve written about in our forthcoming book from MIT Press, called Access Denied). Some of the questions that students raised about the topic and after reading our work on it:

- One student says that her dad read a copy of Dr. Zhivago, censored at the time in his country, where each page was accessible to him only as a photograph. One of her points, I think, is that history repeats itself and we should understand how this story is a repeat and where it is new and different than previous stories of censorship. One student suggests, as a follow-up: let’s test the hypothesis that the Internet is revolutionary. A second of her points, I take it, is that people will figure ways around censorship in clever ways.

- How do you measure filtering of the Internet and then analyze what you’ve learned in a way that informs decision-making?

- How do you measure the impact of filtering on access to knowledge?

- Do we need to have ISPs that act like common carrier who do not ever filter?

- What is the role of large countries as neighbors to smaller countries, raised by the possibility of in-stream filtering?

- What is the role of the commercial filtering providers?

- How can we determine whether the practice of Internet filtering violates a universal right to access information?

- How can we study how copyright and trademark owners carry out filtering?

- Is there legitimate filtering? (A student posits: there is legitimate filtering, including via search engine. This concept invokes what Urs Gasser blogged about, provocatively, at the ONI conference about “best practices in Internet filtering.”)

- How do we study the circumvention piece and include it in our story? What about developing the tools of circumvention?

- How do you overlay cultural differences on this survey?

- To what extent does control of communications facilitate control of other institutions, tools, or otherwise? To what extent is control of communications a priority for a given authority?

- When does one state have the right and/or ability to influence what another state does in this domain?

See Daithi and Ismael for more, better than what I’ve posted here.

The faculty and fellows of the Berkman Center will publish four books this year. Two of them are out already: David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous and John Clippinger’s A Crowd of One. In celebration of this high-water mark for the team, we’ve put together a new page on the Berkman web site called Berkman Books, which features most of the relevant books written by Berkman faculty and fellows since our founding nearly 10 years ago. We’ll keep it updated as new ones come online, such as the ONI’s Access Denied (on Internet filtering) and Prof. Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It, both due out later this year.

One of the most provocative themes from yesterday’s ONI conference is captured by Prof. Dr. Urs Gasser in his blog: is there such a thing as best practices for technical Internet filtering? Richard Clayton said emphatically not; others seemed intrigued.

I couldn’t be more excited about the release today of our new ONI web site and the release of our first global study.  We’re here in Oxford, England, at what my colleague Ron Deibert calls “the first ONI Woodstock, without the drugs.”  The headline of the study is a substantial growth in the scale, scope and sophistication of Internet filtering worldwide, in 25 of the 41 states in which we tested.

We’re gearing up this week to host our first big Internet filtering conference this week, which is already oversubscribed. The event is taking place in Oxford, England, hosted by our partners at the Oxford Internet Institute, in cooperation with our other partners at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and the University of Cambridge’s Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme. At this event, we will release the full set of data from the first-ever global survey of Internet filtering. In many ways, this release is the culmination of five years of work, since the ONI partners began testing for Internet filtering back in about 2002. The work is thanks to a number of grants, most notably a $3 million grant to ONI from the MacArthur Foundation, as well as key gifts from OSI, IDRC, the Ford Foundation, and others.

Feel free to add a question for discussion to the online question tool.

An even more complete version of this story, including chapters that set the data in context, will appear in our book, Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Internet Politics, will be released this fall by MIT Press.

The OpenNet Initiative ran a series of tests related to Internet access during the recent elections in Nigeria.  Though the election was fraught with issues generally, and though certain web sites were inaccessible during key moments of the election period, we found no evidence of tampering with the Internet.  We’re in the process of refining our election monitoring capabilities, led by Rafal Rohozinski.  We’ve posted a slightly more in-depth statement on the ONI blog.

As part of our first-ever OpenNet Initiative conference in May, we are participating in a debate at the Oxford Union.  The resolution is: “This House believes that the Internet is the greatest force for Democratisation in the World.”

The OpenNet Initiative is holding its first-ever conference on May 18 in Oxford, England, at the Oxford Internet Institute. The conference is free and open to the public, but you must register and the event is capped at 100 participants. You can register on this wiki. We will be sharing the initial results of our first global survey of Internet filtering, which will later be published by MIT Press in a book, Access Denied: The Practice and Politics of Internet Filtering, later this year. We hope you’ll join us in Oxford later this Spring.

Congratulations to Professor Ron Deibert (a/k/a “profd”) and his entire Citizen Lab team on today’s release of their new application, psiphon. The festivities here in Toronto include lectures at noon, as part of Protect the Net – Toronto, and then the world-wide release of the application from 3 – 7 p.m., all at the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto. The release of psiphon has already garnered extensive press coverage.

In the words of the CL team, “psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor.”

We’ve just gathered a key subset of our global team of ONI researchers to review the filtering data we’ve gathered from around the world. WIRED’s Mark Anderson sat in on part of the meetings and has a sneak peek. We’ll have a book out on this topic come Springtime.