[NA-Discuss] Unrest continues to be met with Internet lockdown

[Garth Bruen at KnujOn]

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 at abenaki.wabanaki.net>
> Date: Wed, February 16, 2011 11:44 am
> To: na-discuss at 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 withdrawn later.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.
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