UK's GCHQ Takes A Page From China, Plans To Build A Great British Firewall

from the well,-that's-just-dandy dept

Generally speaking, taking cues from China on things like best ways to censor the internet… probably isn’t the best idea. Yet, it appears that’s exactly what the UK’s big surveillance agency, GCHQ is doing. The “Director-General of Cyber” (that’s a thing? yikes!) at GCHQ, Ciaran Martin, gave a speech at a cybersecurity summit in DC recently and announced exciting plans to censor the UK internet at a DNS level. No, really.

Finally, we’re exploring a flagship project on scaling up DNS filtering: what better way of providing automated defences at scale than by the major private providers effectively blocking their customers from coming into contact with known malware and bad addresses? Now it’s crucial that all of these economy-wide initiatives are private sector led. The Government does not own or operate the Internet. Consumers must have a choice. Any DNS filtering would have to be opt out based. So addressing privacy concerns and citizen choice is hardwired into our programme.

Of course, while the reasoning and sentiment may sound good, we’ve pointed out time and time again how DNS filtering, in particular is a really bad idea that actually does more harm than good for internet security. The internet works under the expectation that when you put in an address, the DNS system returns with info from the proper server.

And, of course, once you start mucking with the DNS system for filtering out stuff that you consider to be “malware” or “bad addresses” you open it up to much worse. You also end up validating China’s Great Firewall, since China just responds that their use of DNS filtering is also used to block “bad addresses.” It’s just that they have a different interpretation of what’s “bad.”

Filed Under: ciaran martin, dns, filter, firewall, gchq, great british firewall, great firewall, uk

Baidu Pushes Back On Chinese Gov't Investigation By Freeing Up Images Related To Tiananmen Square

from the power-play dept

So we’ve talked a lot about the Great Firewall of China and how it works. Contrary to what many believe, it’s not just a giant government bureaucracy blacklisting content, but a huge ecosystem that partially relies on unpredictability and the lack of intermediary liability protections online. That is, rather than directly say “this and that are blocked,” the Chinese government will often just let companies know when they’ve failed to properly block content and threaten them with serious consequences. Because of this, you get a culture of overblocking, to avoid running afoul of the demands. This is one of the reasons why we believe that strong intermediary liability protections are so important. Without them, you’re basically begging for widespread censorship to avoid legal consequences.

And, in many ways, it works quite well in China. Yes, sophisticated users know how to use VPNs and proxies and to get around the blocks, but many people do not. But something interesting is happening in China right now, as one of the largest and most successful internet companies there appears to be challenging the censorship regime. First, it’s important to recognize that in China, one subject that is absolutely, without question, censored, is anything relating to the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown of 1989. On the internet in China, it’s as if the event never happened. People have tried workarounds, using euphemisms and wordplay, but eventually those get disappeared down the memory hole too. There was even that time the censors banned the term “big yellow duck,” after people replaced the famous tanks in the “tank man” photo with giant rubber ducks:

But something odd happened yesterday. Suddenly, on Baidu (which is like the Google of China), searches related to the tank man and other symbols of the Tiananmen Square protests were showing up on Baidu. Clay Shirky, who has been living in China recently, posted details on his Twitter feed, which is well worth reading:

China's https://t.co/G1q2OYdfSV unblocks search results for ????? (known to us as tank man, from Tiananmen massacre) pic.twitter.com/DU2X3RZnWv

— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) May 6, 2016

It appears that this is something of a reaction to the Chinese government announcing that it will be investigating Baidu’s advertising practices, following the death of a young man from cancer, who had kicked up quite a lot of attention after he had tried an “experimental” cancer treatment he discovered via an ad on Baidu. When it didn’t work, he blamed Baidu for allowing the ad, and when he passed away there was a public outcry. In response, the government announced plans to investigate Baidu’s ad practices. It appears that Baidu loosening the padlocks on Tiananmen Square might be a response to that, which lots of people seem to think is playing with a fire in a manner that will almost certainly leave the company burned.

This is a direct & blatant refusal to play by the rules. Baidu has a lot of power behind the scenes, but even then, this looks like treason.

— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) May 6, 2016

This will probably end soon – hearing from friends in Beijing that some searches are censored again – but it will cause months of trouble.

— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) May 6, 2016

Young, educated Chinese are so used to cat and mouse censorship that when they see something like this, they screenshot immediately.

— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) May 6, 2016

At a conservative guess, there've been a billion screenshots taken of various banned images, jokes, and memes during the last day.

— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) May 6, 2016

Shirky has a lot more to say, including some further speculation that perhaps there was growing tension from last year, after the Chinese government basically made use of Baidu to fire a denial of service at GitHub. The fact that the packets came via Baidu was, as Shirky notes, a PR blackeye for Baidu at a time when the company wants to expand beyond China. Shirky also deleted a tweet that originally said “this has to backfire,” noting how central media and internet censorship is to the current regime.

The brief dropping of the censorship appears to be (again, Shirky notes no one knows for sure — but many people seem to believe) Baidu trying to let the Chinese government know that it has become powerful enough to make trouble for the government, so it’s not just a one way street in terms of who holds the power. Of course, that seems like an incredibly risky move to make if you really don’t have enough power to stand up to the government.

We may never know all the details of what’s going on, but it’s a brief, if fascinating, view into some of what’s going on in China today with the Great Firewall, and the increasing power of some of its most successful companies. But it’s also a reminder of why we should be so thankful for strong intermediary liability protections in the US, and how not having such protections is a sure path to censorship.

Filed Under: ads, censorship, china, clay shirky, great firewall, intermediary liability, investigations, power, search, tank man
Companies: baidu

Why The Growing Unpredictability Of China's Censorship Is A Feature, Not A Bug

from the watch-your-step dept

Over the years, Techdirt has been trying to keep up with the deepening censorship in China, as more and more ways are found by the authorities to keep online users in check. Given the political situation there, that’s hardly a surprise, but what is strange is the following, reported by Tech In Asia:

China’s internet censors have been busy recently. Last week we saw the uptight folks at SAPPRFT [State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, China’s main censorship body] take down Papi Jiang, a viral video comedian of sorts who had even attracted VC funding, over a few curse words. We also saw Apple?s online books and movies platforms get taken offline, reportedly thanks to SAPPRFT’s sudden demands.

It’s all very depressing, but it also highlights one of the most effective aspects of China’s online censorship regime: it?s totally unpredictable.

Naïvely, you might think that the Chinese government would want to establish very clear lines in the sand that its citizens must not, under any circumstances, cross. But the Tech In Asia post perceptively points that unpredictability has a big advantage, using the following analogy:

Imagine being near a steep cliff. During the day, when you can see clearly, you might walk right up to the edge to take in the view. But at night or during a thick fog, you’re probably going to steer well clear of the cliff’s edge to ensure that you don?t accidentally misjudge where you are and tumble to your death.

Here’s how that works out for censorship:

China’s vaguely-defined web content rules and inconsistent censorship enforcement work the same way as the fog near a cliff: since people can’t see exactly where the edge is, they’re more likely to stay far away from it, just in case. There’s no toeing the line, because nobody knows exactly where the line is. So instead of pushing the envelope, many people choose to censor themselves.

In order to ensure that margin of safety, people will tend to censor themselves more than is necessary according to the stated rules. If the line in the sand were well defined, they could step right up to it, fairly secure that they will be safe provided they don’t cross. In effect, by introducing an unnerving element of uncertainty into its actions, China obtains a more stringent self-censorship on the part of its citizens than it would from formally applying well-defined rules through official channels.

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Filed Under: censorship, chilling effects, china, free speech, great firewall, unpredictability

Using Content Delivery Networks To Circumvent The Great Firewall Of China

from the digital-cat-and-mouse dept

Techdirt has written many times about the online cat-and-mouse game being played out in China, whereby people adopt various technical approaches to get around official censorship, the authorities find ways to block them, forcing Internet users to find new methods, and so on. According to a recent report in The New York Times, the Chinese government is adopting even more severe measures against those who try to circumvent the Great Firewall:

The Chinese government is shutting down the mobile service of residents in Xinjiang who use software that lets them circumvent Internet filters, escalating an already aggressive electronic surveillance strategy in the country’s fractious western territory.

The problem here is that it’s pretty obvious when people are using things like VPNs, and so it’s easy to punish them as China is now apparently starting to do. A clever new approach, discussed in the MIT Technology Review, avoids that shortcoming by using a key aspect of the modern Internet’s infrastructure: content delivery networks (CDNs). As the post explains:

when you visit a popular website, your computer is usually directed to download it from the servers of a content delivery network, a company such as Akamai that website operators pay to store copies of their data on many servers around the world so people can access it faster. Use of content delivery networks is very common among major sites and growing; Cisco expects a majority of all Internet traffic to pass through them within a few years.

A new plug-in called CacheBrowser, available for Chrome currently and Firefox soon, takes advantage of this fact. When someone in China requests a site that makes use of CDNs to deliver its content, the plug-in routes it directly to the CDN hosting it, without calling on a DNS server. Taking this approach makes the request immune to so-called “DNS interference” by the authorities, which is the most common way China blocks access to forbidden sites. Even if all traffic is intercepted and analysed, there is no way for the Chinese authorities to find out which site on the CDN is being accessed, provided an encrypted connection is used — yet another reason to move all Internet connections to HTTPS.

For encrypted requests, the government censors must either allow the traffic to connect to the site mirrored on the CDN, or block access to the CDN itself, and thus to every site using that CDN. Since so many popular and important sites now make use of CDNs, blocking them would have a major impact on Chinese business and research, as well as on the general public. Provided the perceived cost of that damage outweighs the adverse effects of allowing unfettered access to banned sites, the Chinese government is unlikely to block these encrypted connections to major CDNs.

A paper by the two creators of CacheBrowser (pdf) gives more details of exactly how it works, and ways in which it might be attacked. One they don’t mention appeared in an earlier Techdirt post about China’s struggle to reconcile the needs of its citizens to access useful and important information online with the government’s desire to block material it deems harmful. The approach employed there was to use a “man-in-the-middle” attack against Google to allow state censors to check what was being searched for. Maybe something similar would work against CacheBrowser. If the idea of using CDNs to by-pass the Great Firewall starts to catch on, we will doubtless find out.

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Filed Under: cdns, china, content delivery networks, free speech, great firewall, privacy

Russian Experiment Tried — And Failed — To Block Citizens' Access To The Rest Of Internet

from the in-Russia,-the-Internet-disconnects-you dept

For some time, Techdirt has been reporting on Russia’s efforts to control every aspect of online activity in the country. But it seems that the authorities there are still worried that its citizens will find ways around these measures. As a result, The Telegraph reports, the Russian government carried out a rather interesting experiment recently:

Russia’s ministry of communications and Roskomnadzor, the national internet regulator, ordered communications hubs run by the main Russian internet providers to block traffic to foreign communications channels by using a traffic control system called DPI.

The objective was to see whether the Runet — the informal name for the Russian internet — could continue to function in isolation from the global internet.

The blocking part failed for an interesting reason:

Smaller providers account for over 50 per cent of the market in some Russian regions, [and] generally lack the DPI technology used by the larger companies to implement the blocking orders, and often use satellite connections that cannot be easily blocked.

It’s not clear why DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) was needed if it was simply a matter of determining the destination of traffic. But in any case, if lack of DPI capabilities and satellite links are the problem, a fix would be to “encourage” smaller, regional ISPs to consolidate so that they could hook up with the main Internet backbones in Russia and acquire the necessary DPI kit.

Russia denies that anything took place, but according to The Telegraph story, a similar test took place last year:

security agencies including the FSB [Federal Security Service], the defence ministry, and the interior ministry collaborated with the national telephone operator to see if a national intranet made up of the domain names ending in .ru or .рФ could continue to operate if cut off from other parts of the Internet.

That test was reportedly ordered personally by Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, to assess the Russian internet?s ability to continue operating if Western countries introduce sanctions cutting off the country from the internet, and resulted in a decision to build backup infrastructure to ensure the Runet’s continued operation.

Despite the denials, that no-nonsense approach is consistent with the way Mr Putin tends to do things, so it seems likely that the tests did indeed take place. It also means that the attempts to create a system that allows Runet to be cut off from the rest of the Internet are likely to continue until they succeed.

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Filed Under: block access, censorship, free speech, great firewall, internet, internet access, runet, russia

China Forces Developers Of Great Wall Circumvention Tools To Delete Their Software

from the no-programming-for-you dept

Danny O’Brien, over at the EFF’s Deeplinks blog, has the story of how it appears China is pressuring the developers of tools for circumventing the Great Firewall of China to shut down their repositories and no longer offer the code. Two separate, non-commercial, developers of circumvention tools have quietly gone dark recently:

The maintainer of GoAgent, one of China’s more popular censorship circumvention tools emptied out the project’s main source code repositories on Tuesday. Phus Lu, the developer, renamed the repository?s description to ?Everything that has a beginning has an end?. Phus Lu?s Twitter account’s historywas also deleted, except for a single tweet that linked to a Chinese translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn?s ?Live Not By Lies?. That essay was originally published in 1974 on the day of the Russian dissident?s arrest for treason.

We can guess what caused Phus Lu to erase over four years? work on an extremely popular program from the brief comments of another Chinese anti-censorship programmer, Clowwindy. Clowwindy was the chief developer of ShadowSocks, another tool that circumvented the Great Firewall of China by creating an encrypted tunnel between a simple server and a portable client. Clowwindy also deleted his or her Github repositories last week. In a comment on the now empty Github archive Clowwindy wrote in English:

Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this. Today they asked me to delete all the code from Github. I have no choice but to obey.

The author deleted that comment too shortly afterwards.

As you may recall, back in March, China launched a massive DDoS attack on Github, targeting another tool for getting around the Great Firewall, called Greatfire. It seems equally notable that in the last week, there was another big DDoS attempt on Github.

While it may not be surprising at all that China is looking to stop tools that allow people to get past the censorship wall that the Chinese government itself has created, it still is worrisome:

Chinese law has long forbidden the selling of telecommunication services that bypass the Great Firewall of China, as well as the creation or distribution of ?harmful information?. Until recently, however, the authorities have not targeted the authors of non-commercial circumvention software, nor its users. Human Rights in China, a Chinese rights advocacy and research organization, told EFF that, based on its preliminary review, VPNs and circumvention software is not specifically prohibited under Chinese law. While the state interferes with people’s ability to use such software, it has not outlawed the software itself.

In November, Phus Lu wrote a public declaration to clarify this point. In the statement, he stated that he has received no money to develop GoAgent, provided no circumvention service, nor asserted any political view.

As O’Brien notes, this is a reminder that code is speech — and government intimidation to shut down code is a form of repressing speech. Though, as with many attempts to censor, it seems like this is more for show than actual impact:

It?s also as ultimately futile: while the Chinese authorities have chosen to target and disrupt two centralised stores of code, thousand of forked copies of the same software exist?both on other accounts on Github and in private copies around the Net. ShadowSocks and GoAgent represent hours of creative work for their authors, but the principle behind them is reproducible by many other coders. The Great Firewall may be growing more sophisticated in detecting and blocking new circumvention systems, but even as it does so, so new code blossoms.

Meanwhile the intimidation of programmers remains a violation of the human rights of the coder?and a blow to the rights of everyone who relies on their creativity to exercise their own rights.

Filed Under: china, circumvention, free specression, goagent, great firewall, shadowsocks, takedowns, threats

Another Reason To Deploy Encryption Widely: Spiking China's 'Great Cannon' Attack

from the reasons-to-be-crypto dept

A couple of weeks ago, Mike provided an in-depth analysis of China’s new tactic in its longstanding efforts to restrict access by its population to material that challenges the official narrative. This powerful DDoS attack has now been dubbed “China’s Great Cannon” by researchers in a fascinating analysis published by The Citizen Lab. As Mike pointed out, one reason why this new approach has been developed is that it is not possible to block individual URLs when HTTPS traffic is involved. Thus, ironically, the increased use of encryption — which is meant to protect users online — led to the development of a powerful new digital weapon that potentially makes them not just victims, but even part of the attack. However, encryption is also a remedy, as The Citizen Lab researchers write:

Our findings in China add another documented case to at least two other known instances of governments tampering with unencrypted Internet traffic to control information or launch attacks — the other two being the use of QUANTUM by the US NSA and UK?s GCHQ. In addition, product literature from two companies, FinFisher and Hacking Team, indicate that they sell similar “attack from the Internet” tools to governments around the world. These latest findings emphasize the urgency of replacing legacy web protocols, like HTTP, with their cryptographically strong versions, like HTTPS.

However, the remedy is only partial. Writing on his blog, Brian Krebs quotes Bill Marczak, one of the lead authors of the Great Cannon report, as saying:

Relying on an always-on encryption strategy is not a foolproof counter to this attack, because plug-ins like https-everywhere will still serve regular unencrypted content when Web sites refuse to or don’t offer the same content over an encrypted connection. What’s more, many Web sites draw content from a variety of sources online, meaning that the Great Cannon attack could succeed merely by drawing on resources provided by online ad networks that serve ads on a variety of Web sites from a dizzying array of sources.

“Some of the scripts being injected in this attack are from online ad networks,” Marczak said. ?But certainly this kind of attack suggests a far more aggressive use of https where available.”

This confirms that encryption is no panacea, but is certainly worth deploying. The fact that it can make China’s Great Cannon attacks harder, if not impossible, should also give pause to government officials around the world as they try to demonize encryption and call for it to be weakened or even banned.

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Filed Under: ddos, encryption, great cannon, great firewall, https

China's Great Firewall Turned Around: Why China Wants To Censor Global Internet

from the pay-attention----this-matters-a-lot dept

If you pay attention to Github (and you should), you know that late last week the site started experiencing some problems staying online, thanks to a massive and frequently changing DDoS attack. Over the past few days a lot more details have come out, making it pretty clear that the attack is coming via China with what is likely direct support from the Chinese government. While it’s messing with all of Github, it’s sending traffic to two specific Github pages: https://github.com/greatfire and https://github.com/cn-nytimes. Those both provide tools to help people in China access Greatfire and the NY Times. Notably, Greatfire itself notes that prior to the DDoS on Github, its own site was hit with a very similar DDoS attack.

If you want the technical details, Netresec explains how the DDoS works, noting that it’s a “man-on-the-side” attack, injecting certain packets alongside code loaded by Chinese search engine Baidu (including both its ad platform and analytics platform), but is unlikely to be coming directly from Baidu itself.

But the much more interesting part is why China is using a DDoS attack, rather than its standard approach of just blocking access in China, as it has historically done. The key is that, two years ago, China tried to block Github entirely… and Chinese programmers flipped out, pointing out that they couldn’t do their jobs without Github. The Chinese censors were forced to back down, leading to a sort of loophole in the Great Firewall. That leads to the next question of why China doesn’t just block access to the URLs of the two repositories it doesn’t like? And the answer there: HTTPS. Because all Github traffic is encrypted via HTTPS, China can’t just block access to those URLs, because it doesn’t know specifically what’s being accessed.

And thus, we get the decision to turn its firewall around, launching a rather obvious DDoS attack on the two sites it doesn’t like, with the rather clear message being sent to Github: if you stop hosting these projects, the DDoS will stop. Of course, so far Github is taking a stand and refusing to take down those projects (which is great and exactly what it should be doing).

However, this does suggest an interesting escalation in questions about the increasing attempts to fragment the internet. You see various countries demanding (or forcing) certain websites get blocked. But those solutions are truly only temporary. Because the overall internet is too important to block, and because some sites are necessary (like Github) there are always holes in the system. Add in a useful dose of encryption (yay!) and the ability to control everything that’s read in one particular country becomes increasingly difficult. You might hope the response would be to give up attempts to censor, but China isn’t likely to give up just like that. So, instead, it’s basically trying to censor the global internet, by launching a high powered attack on the site that is the problem, while basically saying “get rid of these projects and we’ll stop the attack.”

It seems likely that this sort of escalation is only going to continue — but in some ways it’s actually a good sign. It shows that there are real cracks in China’s attempts to censor the internet. We’re basically realizing the limits of the Great Firewall of China, and useful services like Github have allowed a way to tunnel through. China is responding by trying to make life difficult for Github, but as long as Github and others can figure out ways to resist, censorship attempts like the Great Firewall will increasingly be useless.

In the early days of the internet, people talked about how it was resistant to censorship. Over the past decade or so, China has challenged that idea, showing that it could basically wall off large parts of the internet, and actually keep things semi-functional. Yes, there were always cracks in the wall, but for the most part, China showed that you could censor large parts of the internet. This latest move suggests that we may be moving back towards a world where the internet really is resistant to censorship — and China is freaking out about it and responding by trying to increase the censorship globally. It’s a battle that is going to be important to follow if you believe in supporting free expression online.

Filed Under: censorship, china, ddos, encryption, great firewall, injection, man in the side
Companies: github, greatfire, ny times

How The Great Firewall Of China Caused A DDOS Attack In France

from the global-village dept

Many people outside China know about the country’s Great Firewall, but probably assume it will have little, if any, impact on their own online activities. However, a fascinating post on Benjamin Sonntag’s blog explains how one of the servers of La Quadrature du Net, the Paris-based digital freedom association he co-founded, and for which his company provides free hosting, was hit by distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) caused directly by the Great Firewall’s policies.

His blog post provides all the technical details: it turned out that the vast majority of the attacks were coming from Chinese IP addresses. Here’s what seems to have happened:

China is censoring its Internet, that’s well known

to do this, this country censors (among others) DNS [Domain Name System] queries in its network (and also censoring as a side effect, the rare Japanese, Korean or Taiwanese queries going through China)

when it answers a DNS query to a censored website, it answers with “any incorrect IP address” instead.

That is, instead of letting Chinese Net users access “forbidden” content, the Great Firewall generally re-directs them to some random, presumably harmless, site. But that wasn’t happening here:

we see spikes of requests to websites censored in China coming to IP addresses such as those of La Quadrature du Net. Other people had this same issue : http://furbo.org/2015/01/22/fear-china/

So, the end story is that we just saw censored websites requests coming to La Quadrature du Net’s IP address from China, due to how the Chinese Internet censorship is working!

Rather than pushing limited traffic to lots of sites, the Great Firewall was sending lots of traffic to just a few. Among the possible explanations for this new behavior, Sonntag offers two that are equally worrying:

Maybe one of the system administrator of the great firewall of China is gaining some small and quick money selling DDOS, selling Internet attacks to the highest bidder (in bitcoin? 😉 ) and using that censorship system as a weapon

Maybe China chose a precise list of targets to send censored traffic to, adding to this technical “useful” process (the censorship) a “nice” one (putting down foreign opponents’ websites)… La Quadrature du Net, as a digital freedom association, seems to be too nice a target (among others of course).

Neither is good news for sites in the West. Whatever the real reason for this DDOS attack on La Quadrature, it certainly shows that the operation of the Great Firewall of China can have very direct effects outside that country. Another reason, perhaps, for those in the West to pay closer attention to China’s increasingly harsh approach to online censorship.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: china, ddos, france, great firewall
Companies: la quadrature du net

Indian Government And Telcos Explore How To Build Great Firewall Of India To Censor Porn And Other 'Undesirable' Content

from the censorship-is-its-own-reward dept

Over the last few years, we’ve noted that India is among those countries that have been increasingly looking to censor parts of the internet, with porn being a particular target. It appears that at least some of those plans are moving forward. News reports are detailing how government officials and a variety of telco execs recently all gathered to discuss how they might go about censoring the internet on a mass scale. From Medianama:

On September 5th 2014, 23 individuals, including Telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, CERT-IN head Gulshan Rai, government officials from DoT, Deity, CBI, as well as representatives of industry bodies like IAMAI, FICCI, ASSOCHAM, CII met in the Conference Room No. 1007 at the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (Deity) to discuss how such a filter might be implemented?Not whether there should be a filter at all, but how such a filter should be implemented.

In fact, when NASSCOM raised the issue of blocking legitimate content, the Telecom Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, who chaired the meeting, said that the ?larger issue of respecting cultural values of the country and sentiments of the Indian society need to be considered and all possible ways and means may have to be devised in this context.?

Medianama details the many problems and concerns of such a plan, including the simple fact that plenty of legitimate content will likely be sucked up into this filter, that there’s no transparency in what’s blocked and what’s allowed — and that once a filter is in place, the intent and type of content blocked will inevitably increase.

It is truly worrisome that this is the world we’re heading towards, where something that was once seen as only the sort of thing that happened in authoritarian countries like China and Iran will start to become the norm. And while the US is unlikely to go quite as far, it has to be acknowledged that the US government is all for censoring certain websites with little to no transparency or due process, meaning that the US doesn’t even have a moral leg to stand on if it protests other countries setting up their own censorship regimes.

Filed Under: censorship, filter, free speech, great firewall, india, isps