Norwegian writer Mette Newth once wrote that: “censorship has followed the free expressions of men and women like a shadow throughout history.” Indeed, as we develop innovative and more effective tools to gather and create information, new means to control, erase and censor that information evolve alongside it. But how do we study Internet censorship?
Organisations such as Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House, or the Open Net Initiative periodically report on the extent of censorship worldwide. But as countries that are fond of censorship are not particularly keen to share details, we must resort to probing filtered networks, i.e., generating requests from within them to see what gets blocked and what gets through. We cannot hope to record all the possible censorship-triggering events, so our understanding of what is or isn’t acceptable to the censor will only ever be partial. And of course it’s risky, or even outright illegal, to probe the censor’s limits within countries with strict censorship and surveillance programs.
This is why the leak of 600GB of logs from hardware appliances used to filter internet traffic in and out of Syria was a unique opportunity to examine the workings of a real-world internet censorship apparatus.
Leaked by the hacktivist group Telecomix, the logs cover a period of nine days in 2011, drawn from seven Blue Coat SG-9000 internet proxies. The sale of equipment like this to countries such as Syria is banned by the US and EU. California-based manufacturer Blue Coat Systems denied making the sales but confirmed the authenticity of the logs – and Dubai-based firm Computerlinks FZCO later settled on a US$2.8m fine for unlawful export. In 2013, researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab demonstrated how authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Yemen, Egypt and Kuwait all rely on US-made equipment like those from Blue Coat or McAfee’s SmartFilter software to perform filtering.