Re: [NA-Discuss] Unrest continues to be met with Internet lockdown
It's not me that needs convincing. Evan and Gareth (and you) would need to argue that case, and they have made their opinions on the matter known. And I am in agreement that if producing a statement that says not much more than "freedom good, lockdown bad" would do more harm than good, then we shouldn't. But if we could take to them something that resonates, such as an information source as Eric proposes, or, call me crazy, is there something we could do/create/publish, given our technical and political expertise, that might somehow help users find their way around an Internet block? Information always seems to find a way...is there an alternative conduit? Or some sort of technical/legal intersection that would give us a lever on which to craft a statement? In addition, it would be good to hear from as many ALSs as possible on this issue. -----Original Message-----
From: Marc Rotenberg <rotenberg@epic.org> Sent: Feb 16, 2011 12:41 PM To: Beau Brendler <beaubrendler@earthlink.net> Cc: Garth Bruen at KnujOn <gbruen@knujon.com>, Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@abenaki.wabanaki.net>, na-discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org Subject: Re: [NA-Discuss] Unrest continues to be met with Internet lockdown
Relevant article in todays NY Times:
"Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet," Feb. 15, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/technology/16internet.html?hp
This issue is not going away. ALAC should develop a position.
Marc.
On Feb 16, 2011, at 12:36 PM, Beau Brendler wrote:
Eric wrote:
I see no point in revisiting the recent limited statements of ICANN or ALAC, or their offered rationals, but I do see a point in attempting to know what access models actually exist, and having data sufficient to support predictive modeling of disruptive local policy on the regional and global internet.
How can we put something like this together? This kind of information-gathering would be helpful to the user community and could also probably be used to get the attention of the press.
-----Original Message-----
From: Garth Bruen at KnujOn <gbruen@knujon.com> Sent: Feb 16, 2011 11:50 AM To: Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@abenaki.wabanaki.net> Cc: na-discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org Subject: Re: [NA-Discuss] Unrest continues to be met with Internet lockdown
Not proposing a re-write, just staying abreast
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [NA-Discuss] Unrest continues to be met with Internet lockdown From: Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@abenaki.wabanaki.net> Date: Wed, February 16, 2011 11:44 am To: na-discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org
Garth,
Again, I never hope to be more than a minority of one, and while I read MENA IT news on NANOG, MENOG, Aljazeera (commercially censored in most North American broadcast/cable media markets) and through S/N feeds from or about contacts in West Asia and North Africa, I find it useful to distinguish what technical means are being deployed to effect some explicit or implicit state policy goal.
I* know that targeted communications degradation was attempted first, affecting S/N data flows, and when either that failed, due to the scale of the S/N participating nodes (thousands of SMS and IPv4 capable devices sourcing audio and video capture data) or the policy goal required degradation of more instances of communications than just S/N, prefix withdrawals were announced by all access and transit providers with the exception of the Noor Group, who's prefixes were withdrawn later.
The mechanism pursued by the Syrian state until last week, and the mechanism utilized by the Iranian state, during the last election, and recently, S/N blocking and rate throttling, and the mechanisms utilized by the Algerian state, the Bahrain state, the Lybian state, are distinct.
The utility of "keeping score by technical means" is that it allows an analysis of whether other technical mechanisms such as deep packet inspection and content analysis, routine in North America and present also in Europe, but requiring high capitalization of the intercept platform, are keeping pace with the repressive state's policy requirements and the liberation social movements and the political organizations means of maintaining internal and external communications.
I see no point in revisiting the recent limited statements of ICANN or ALAC, or their offered rationals, but I do see a point in attempting to know what access models actually exist, and having data sufficient to support predictive modeling of disruptive local policy on the regional and global internet.
Eric
* Some subscribers have attributed other mechanisms, or a lack of data sufficient to make any attribution. ------ NA-Discuss mailing list NA-Discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/na-discuss
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On 2/16/11 1:16 PM, Beau Brendler wrote:
... call me crazy, is there something we could do/create/publish, given our technical and political expertise, that might somehow help users find their way around an Internet block? Information always seems to find a way...is there an alternative conduit? Or some sort of technical/legal intersection that would give us a lever on which to craft a statement?
Well, I'm writing a recommendation for registry operators that out of band communications in the form of: o V/SAT reserve capability o ATA reserve capability be planned-in to the registry technical capacity. For most of 2005-2009 I traveled through about 40 states and several provinces and retained operational capability through a V/SAT link to my servers in Maine. Had the EAN (Egyptian Academic Network) used local V/SAT (I observed dishes with video reception-only arms on many roofs in Cairo in November 2008) uplink the issue of .eg zone expiry at the secondaries, the only issue ICANN actually took notice of, would not have arisen. The most robust plan would include address allocation through two or more satellite communications vendor, e.g., Arabsat _and_ Nilesat. Additionally, the POTS fabric and good old (overlooked by Howard Dean and subsequent "broadband policy" accessibility advocates) 56kB modems offer another low cost (other than the tip/rs232 skillset maintenance) means for zone file update during packet network disruption. The later was used within 48 hours of the prefix withdrawal of the 27th, reported by Al Jazeera and others, though for SMS-voice relay (speak-to-tweet) [1] and not specifically for data/analog-data/packet relay. The first is in every first-responder network assistance kit. If we look at planned network failure as a kind of unplanned network failure (earthquake, etc.), then "advice for first responders" looks a lot like "advice for residents". The legal lever was handed out in yesterday's statement by the US SoS [1], for those that find some utility in that jurisdictional reference. There have been similar statements made with other jurisdictional associations, e.g. the UN SecGen's statement that "freedom of expression should be fully respected" in Egypt. Oh. Least I forget. Not crazy. But as you've observed, several opinions exist, along with untested assertions. Eric [1] http://signalnews.com/google-twitter-give-egyptians-an-outlet-on-internet176 [2] http://wampum.wabanaki.net/content/secretary-state-hillary-rodham-clinton-ne...
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