It was just after six in the evening, Pakistan time, on Sunday June 3, 2018, when reports started trickling in that people couldn’t access the website of the Awami Workers Party, a relatively new left-wing political group gearing up to contest the Pakistani election in late July.
For Nighat Dad, a digital rights lawyer and activist, the the story was depressingly familiar. Pakistan has a long history of of internet censorship, and is ranked ‘not free’ in Freedom House’s ‘Freedom on the Net’ report for 2017. In August 2016, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority banned sites connected to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement opposition party. Earlier that year the country lifted a ban on YouTube that had lasted just over three years.
But this time, Dad had a secret weapon to fight back with: data. She worked with NetBlocks, a civil society group that helps collect evidence on internet censorship, to quickly assess the extent of this block. After Dad and others shared NetBlock’s web probe – an in-browser tool that checks which websites are currently being blocked, and where that blocking is happening – the evidence quickly came in that the website was blocked by a range of ISPs, including the PTCL, Pakistan’s national telecoms company.
In less than 48 hours, this evidence made its way into complaints filed with the Election Commission of Pakistan and the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, alleging that the blocking violates the article in Pakistan’s constitution upholding freedom of speech. A day later, and without any official acknowledgment of the complaint, the website was back online. “They discretely started opening the website,” says Dad, one ISP at a time.
For Alp Toker, founder of NetBlocks, this is exactly why he built these censorship-tracking tools. “These are people from their own community standing up to collect evidence about something that is affecting them personally, and their right to free and fair elections,” he says. And now he wants to take his censorship tracker global.
Toker’s model is simple. When he recieves reports that a website or platform is being censored, he tries to get tracking tools into the hands of people hit by the block. The most simple of those is the web probe, which people run just by clicking a link in their browser. The probe attempts to access any number of preset domains – a list that usually includes all the major social platforms and messaging apps, but that can be customised depending on the specific blocking that is being tested. The scans, as in the Pakistan example, will return a list of which sites are being banned, and in which areas.
“This creates data points, actual actionable data points that can be used as evidence,” he says. And it’s absolutely crucial that this happens as quickly as possible. “It's always the case that the rapid response window is when you make changes. First minutes, then hours. Once it's days it's too late,” he says. “We need to get involved before those issues become entrenched.”
Toker isn’t interested in screaming into the void when it comes to internet censorship – he wants people to turn the data he collects into evidence that can be used to persuade authorities to reverse their decisions. When the internet is blocked, it’s Toker’s goal to make sure that doesn’t happen unnoticed. “I believe that this kind of work enables people to push back against bad policies – policies which damage economies, the tourism sector, startups – these are hurting people's countries,” he says.
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So far NetBlocks has run scans in a handful of countries, including Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, Pakistan, Spain and Kenya, and the group has a few approaches that help them keep an eye on different kinds of censorship. First is the web probe, which can be deployed to confirm reports of blockages, and find out the extent of the censorships. On December 31, 2017, NetBlocks used its web probes to confirm reports of a total ban on Telegram within Iran.
While web probes are well-suited to ad hoc situations, NetBlocks also has a network of always-on hardware probes that are constantly checking for blockages. In Turkey, where Toker originally started this project, he has dozens of these hardware probes directly plugged into routers across the country. In other countries where NetBlocks has less of a presence there tends to be just a couple of these probes, enough to raise a warning signal when a big website disappears offline but not necessarily enough to confirm the extent of a block.
Netblocks’ last tool is the differential scanner. This can operate remotely and identify cases where the internet has been turned off in an area altogether, or slowed down significantly. Toker used this tool to identify localised internet shutdowns in Kenya’s disputed elections last year as well as during the Catalonian independence referendum in October, where an outage affected between 4,000 and 5,000 people during polling.
Toker believes that, in the face of internet blockages, solid evidence is one of the most powerful weapons people can weild. Even though in places such as Iran, people widely use VPNs to circumvent censorship, Toker says that getting round blocks isn’t good enough. “We believe that circumvention isn't the solution, we want the government to put it on and keep it on,” he says.
Often this means finding ways to open dialogues with the people behind the censorship. Even the most authoritarian regimes have people that are open to change, even if the freedom of speech argument is unlikely to win them over, there’s a good chance they might respond to the argument that internet shutdowns damages their economy. “It’s just a matter of unlocking those viewpoints.”
And to build these persuasive cases, NetBlocks has developed a tool that estimates the cost that each shutdown has on a country’s economy. When Sri Lankan government shutdown WhatsApp and Viber in an attempt to cut of communication during riots in March this year, NetBlocks estimated that the total cost to the country’s economy was as high as $30 million (£22.6m).
Joss Wright, a security researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, agrees that combating internet censorship means talking to the people behind the blocks. “If you really want to make a systemic change you need to engage with the government in a country or engage with the authorities who are filtering stuff in the country,” he says.
But one of the biggest challenges facing internet activists is being able to detect blocks as soon as they happen and not relying on user reports. To get around this problem, Wright has automated trackers that measure the traffic in circumvention tools in a particular country. If the number of people using Tor browser soars, for instance, there’s a good chance that people are switching browser to get around a block.
Eventually, Toker is hoping to take his censorship-tracking tools global, but for now he’s concentrating on monitoring elections. And this means returning to Turkey, where he started NetBlocks’ predecessor, TurkeyBlocks in the wake of a IS bombing in Ankara in October 2015. After the attack, Toker identified nationwide slowdowns of Twitter and Facebook. “Just taking out those two are enough to make people feel isolated,” he says. “You only realise how much you rely on social media when it’s gone.”
As the dust settles after a closely-contested presidential election on June 24, 2018, Toker and his colleagues are back to monitor censorship in their own county. Since April 2017, Turkish authorities have blocked all language editions of Wikipedia, and is the only country to do so, but Toker says that slowly, things are changing. “The most egregious and most broadly harmful problems have been resolved,” he says, but if anything does go amiss in the run-up or aftermath to the general election, he’ll be the first to tell the world about it.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
