An investigation of online censorship in Cyprus

The island of Cyprus, situated in the east of the Mediterranean sea, has always been an important commercial and information exchange hub. Today, this is reflected on the large number of submarine cables that facilitate telecommunications with neighboring countries (Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Syria, and Lebanon) and with the rest of the world (reaching as far as India, South Korea, and Australia). Nevertheless, the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) is officially regarded as a freedom of expression safe haven, where “Internet is completely free of any specific regulation”. Unfortunately, Cypriot netizens claim that such statements couldn’t be further from the truth.

In recent years, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in RoC have implemented an Internet filtering infrastructure to comply with the laws and regulations implied by the National Betting Authority (NBA). In an effort to understand the capacity of this infrastructure, a multi-disciplinary group of volunteers from the hack66 Observatory in Nicosia has collected and analyzed connectivity measurements from end-user connections on a variety of websites and services. Their report was presented at the 7th International Conference on e-Democracy.

For their experiments, the hack66 Observatory team put together a testlist comprising of domains from the National Betting Authority blocklist, the CitizenLab lists for Greece and Turkey, and WordPress blogs banned in Turkey as reported at the Lumen Database. The analysis was based on over 45,000 measurements from four residential ISPs operating in the Republic of Cyprus, that were anonymously submitted using a custom OONI probe during the months of March to May 2017. In addition, the team collected data using open DNS resolvers in Cyprus. Early findings suggest that the most common blocking method is DNS hijacking. Furthermore, the measurements indicate that some of the ISPs have deployed middle-boxes – network components capable of performing censorship, traffic manipulation or surveillance.

A closer inspection on the variations of the censorship mechanism implementations among ISPs raised concerns with regard to transparency and privacy: some ISPs do not inform users why a blocked website is not accessible; while others redirect requests to a web server controlled by the NBA, that could in turn log user identifiers such as their IP address. Similarly, the hack66 Observatory team was able to identify a number of unreported Internet censorship cases, entries in the NBA blocklist that either are invalid or that require sophisticated blocking techniques, and collateral damage due to blocking of email delivery to the regulated domains.

Understanding the case of Internet freedom in Cyprus becomes more complicated when the geopolitical situation is taken into consideration. Apart from the Republic of Cyprus, the island of Cyprus is divided into three other segments: the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus; the United Nations-controlled Green Line buffer zone; and the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia that remain under British control for military purposes. Measurements from the Multimax ISP operating in the area occupied by Turkey indicate network interference practices similar to those of mainland Turkey. This could be interpreted as the existence of two distinct regimes in terms of information policy on the island of Cyprus. No volunteers submitted measurements from the UN buffer zone or the British Sovereign bases. However, it is known via the Snowden revelations that GCHQ is operating a wiretap base in Cyprus codenamed “SOUNDER”, jointly funded by the NSA.

The purpose of the hack66 Observatory is to “to collect and analyze data, and routes of data through EMEA, […] in order to promote evidence based policy making”. The timing is just right, given the recent RoC government announcement of a new bill in the making, to regulate media operations and stop fake news. With their report, the hack66 Observatory aims to provide policy makers with a valuable asset for understanding the limitations and implications of the existing censorship infrastructure, and to start a debate around Internet freedom on the entirety of the island of Cyprus.