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On March 2, the Supreme Court of Pakistan ordered the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority to block 12 websites. This list was in addition to the hundreds of thousands of websites that Pakistan already blocks. Up till now, most internet users in Pakistan had never really cared to speak up about this censorship. But this new blacklist caused millions of personal websites hosted at the blogspot.com domain to be banned. There are hundreds of Pakistani websites hosted at Blogspot, so this single action by the government has led internet users to form an action group against this ban.
The internet is a strange beast. Many of us use it every day – not just when sitting in front of a computer, but every time when using a credit card, filling fuel, sending a SMS, taking a flight – in short just about every modern activity depends on the internet. The use of the internet is spreading everywhere, even to the most surprising places – some farmers in India receive current market prices for their crops on internet enabled cellphones, and the early warning system for tsunamis being developed after the 2004 ocean quake works through the internet.
The internet is a gigantic three-dimensional spider web, where every intersection is a computer which is connected to every other computer on the internet, regardless of its location. The internet is not built by design – it grows organically as computers and networks join it. It is hard to visualise what exactly the internet has become now just 30 odd years after starting with a handful of computers. A map hosted at www.map.com represents just a partial view of the internet. The number of computers on the Internet is staggering – recent estimates put the figure close to a billion computers, and growing fast.
For the layperson, the internet generally means the World Wide Web. The internet is actually the underlying platform on which the Web runs. The internet is essentially made up of computers and cables. The computers send packets of information to other computers through these cables, and the beauty of the internet is that these packets can go through any path. Put up a packet with a correct address anywhere on the internet and it will arrive at its destination, usually in a few milliseconds.
The way the internet works is very simple. Multiple independent networks of arbitrary design are all connected to each other. Every computer on the internet has a unique address, so when you send a message to another computer on the internet, the underlying software breaks the message up into data packets, puts the destination address on every one of these packets, and sends them on to the next computer that it’s connected to. As the packets arrive, each receiving computer looks at the address, and if it’s not addressed to it, sends the packets onwards. This process happens over and over again until the packets arrives at their destination. Each packet of data takes the best possible route available to it – which will vary even over the milliseconds the sending computer takes to transmit the packet.
| The internet is a gigantic three-dimensional spider web, where every intersection is a computer which is connected to every other computer on the internet, regardless of its location. |
 The internet was designed from the ground up to resist damage. And censorship is just another form of damage to the internet. If the data doesn’t make it through to its destination then another route will be automatically tried until all possible routes are exhausted. So if one computer, or a whole bunch of them, decides to block certain types of data, then they will be automatically bypassed.
Pakistan has three major internet links to the world, which consist of two submarine fibre optic links and a few satellite links. All of these are controlled by the Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE) which monitors all incoming and outgoing internet traffic from Pakistan. The primary purpose of PIE is to filter content as and when the government deems fit. A secondary purpose is to keep track of all incoming and outgoing e-mail, which by parliamentary order are kept for a period of at least three months.
If the government controls all outside links to the world, then one might think that it should be a simple matter to censor the internet. Yet this isn’t the case, for the current filtering system in place is very crude. There is a list of banned addresses that the computers at PIE look at and accordingly block requests by users to computers on the blacklist. This is where dynamic flexibility of the internet comes in. If an address is blocked, all one has to do is go through another unblocked address. Such computers are referred to as proxy servers and act as a man in the middle between you and the blocked computer. Any computer on the internet can perform the job of a proxy. As a result, there are potentially a billion ways of bypassing internet censorship.
Many of the top universities in the world such as Duke, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Princeton (to name just a few) have set up such proxy systems to enable users around the world to bypass censorship. Besides universities and individuals acting on their own to protect the freedom of speech, there are many government and privately funded projects set up specifically for the purpose of allowing users to bypass any form of internet censorship. The rise of new and innovative technologies such as peer-to-peer networking means that every single computer, even personal computers (PCs) that were previously never thought of as servers, may be used to serve up content to any other PC.
| Most, if not all, people savvy enough to operate a computer are easily able to bypass any technological blocks set up by the government. At best, the various censorship solutions the government will implement over the next few years will discriminate between the technological haves and have-nots. |
There are, however, methods of censoring the internet that are somewhat harder to bypass for people generally unfamiliar with the way in which the internet works. There is, for example, internet censorship as it is implemented in China – using a list of banned words that are censored on the fly. As users in China request a webpage, the incoming page is first inspected by government servers and blocked if a banned term such as “democracy” is present. Human censors are also actively looking at what people browse on the internet, and block websites as they see fit. This method is also easily bypassed by connecting to a proxy server which scrambles the page as it sends it to you. The links listed at the end of this article offer many other ways to bypass internet censorship. Even a simple Google search would bring up a few hundred thousand websites that will show anyone how to avoid internet censors.
So, what exactly does it mean to block a website? Can it even be done with today’s technology? Simply put, with current technology, the only way to restrict information on the internet is to ban it all together. There is no middle way – the technology simply doesn’t exist. One good example is China, which spends billions of dollars and employs over 40,000 full time government employees in Beijing alone to monitor and restrict Chinese usage of the internet. The Chinese government tries to control and restrict access to a wide variety of topics, such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Falun Gong, Tibet, Taiwan, pornography or democracy. Despite the most sophisticated filtering system in the world, China has failed miserably at its attempt to censor the internet.
The Supreme Court and Government of Pakistan perhaps do not fully understand how the internet works and as such are unable to grasp exactly what they have done. They are still thinking along the lines of traditional media, made up of books, newspapers and magazines that may be physically removed or banned. Having implemented this “black list” they may be under the assumption that they have managed to block certain bad sites, and that everything else will be accessible as usual.
Most, if not all, people savvy enough to operate a computer are easily able to bypass any technological blocks set up by the government. At best, the various censorship solutions the government will implement over the next few years will discriminate between the technological haves and have-nots. At best, attempts to censor the internet will give the censors a false sense of achievement. That they have done nothing except slow down the internet for the entire country, as well as further degrade the country’s image throughout the world is probably not something that might have occurred to them.
The internet, although a network in name and geography, is a creature altogether separate from the traditional networks of the telephone or television industry. It will, indeed it must by its very nature, continue to change and evolve. Trying to impose artificial barriers on the internet is akin to building sand castles on the beach – sand walls can’t stop the spray of information coming over the walls and the next wave of technology may completely overwhelm the entire castle.
In the future, technology will enable governments to control the creation and flow of information. The slippery slope to George Orwell’s 1984 starts here, when we allow governments control of what we can see, read and watch. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and once the censorship drive to ban all bad things begins, it will be a hard animal to stop.
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