[NA-Discuss] Unrest continues to be met with Internet lockdown
Eric Brunner-Williams
ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net
Wed Feb 16 16:44:26 UTC 2011
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withdrawn later.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.
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