[kictanet] Taming and reining in Cyberspace

[Alice Munyua]

Interesting article on legislating the internet......

Best

Alice




http://nationaljournal.com/magazine/taming-and-reining-in-cyberspace-20110915?print=true


  Taming and Reining in Cyberspace


    Now 20 years old, the Web is losing its Wild West freedom.
    Government power in cyberspace is big and growing.

by Josh Smith <http://nationaljournal.com/reporters/bio/110>


          Updated: September 23, 2011 | 10:58 a.m.
          September 15, 2011 | 5:00 p.m.


<http://cdn-media.nationaljournal.com/?controllerName=image&action=get&id=11486> 

DLILLC/Corbis


On Aug. 6, 1991, the World Wide Web went global. British physicist Tim 
Berners-Lee posted the first hyperlink to an online discussion group and 
began the Internet's transformation from an elite tool to a public 
platform. Since then, the Web has spawned dreams of a cyber-realm where 
government censors are powerless, people are free,  and national 
boundaries are meaningless.

"Governments of the Industrial World," wrote Grateful Dead lyricist John 
Perry Barlow in 1996, "you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from 
Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of 
the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no 
sovereignty where we gather."

Twenty years after the Web's debut, governments around the world are 
trying to put the genie back in the bottle. The Internet has indeed 
revolutionized politics and government, but it has hardly transcended 
laws and regulations. From blocking online poker to tracking the 
cyberfootprints of suspected terrorists, governments are exer-cising 
more power over---and through---the Internet than ever before.

"In the early days of the Web, a decade or so ago, it was taken for 
granted that freedom of expression online would inexorably evolve and 
progress," noted a recent report from the OpenNet Initiative, a 
coalition promoting Internet freedom. "It was assumed that governments 
that did not uphold the fundamental human right to speak and write 
freely would be powerless.... By now, though, those dreams have been 
dashed."

China's government demonstrated years ago that it could restrict access 
to the Web and stifle online political criticism. But Western 
governments are becoming more intrusive too, often motivated by popular 
goals: fighting child pornography; tracking criminals and terrorists; 
preventing cyberattacks and fighting cyberwars; and helping political 
opposition groups in countries such as Libya and Iran evade government 
repression.

"Now that the Internet is an integral part of most people's lives, it 
would be contradictory to exclude governments," President Nicolas 
Sarkozy of France told a global conference of technology leaders this 
spring. "Nobody should forget that these governments are the only 
legitimate representatives of the will of the people in our democracies. 
To forget this is to risk democratic chaos and hence anarchy."

    "Governments are the only legitimate representatives of the
    people.... To forget this is to risk democratic chaos." ---President
    Nicolas Sarkozy of France

Earlier this year, France gave police the authority to shut down 
suspected child-pornography websites without a warrant, a move that 
civil libertarians fear could legitimize more-expansive censorship. But 
France is hardly alone. The governments of Tunisia and Turkey, among 
others, have proposed Internet filters to block pornography that could 
also end up restricting access to legitimate websites. The leaders of 
Iran, already one of the world's harshest online censors, are 
transitioning to a state-controlled "national Internet" that allows no 
access to the World Wide Web.

Washington has been ramping up its policing as well. The proposed 
Protect IP Act moving through Congress would give law-enforcement 
agencies more tools to go after pirated content online. Critics say that 
the bill could limit free speech by allowing officials to block websites 
without giving their owners a chance to defend themselves against 
charges of illegal activity. Another bill would require Internet service 
providers to keep their customers' browsing histories for a full year. 
It aims at helping police track down child pornographers, but opponents 
say that the government could mine the information for almost any purpose.

The dilemmas came home to America in a big way in August when San 
Francisco transit officials shutdown cell-phone service in some subway 
stations to head off planned protests in their train stations. The move 
drew rebukes from civil libertarians and sparked a fight with the hacker 
group Anonymous. Angry over the shutdown, Anonymous hacked into a 
transit-authority website, exposing the personal data of people 
unrelated to the agency and even posting nude pictures of a transit 
official. Both sides' actions make it hard to say who was in the right, 
highlighting the tension between government protection and government 
intrusion.

The widening governmental grasp worries civil libertarians and longtime 
champions of Internet freedom. "The world's governments are increasing 
their regulatory attention to the Internet to address a range of 
concerns," said Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and 
Technology, an advocacy group working to keep an "open, innovative, and 
free" Internet. "In the process, some are forgetting---or are 
consciously seeking to repeal or limit---the policy choices that allowed 
the Internet to develop into such a powerful platform for economic 
activity, democratic participation, and human development."

The first half of 2011 saw unprecedented action from the highest levels 
of government and international organizations. In May, the White House 
composed its first-ever International Strategy for Cyberspace, designed 
to coordinate Internet efforts among federal agencies. Also in May, the 
Group of Eight leading industrial nations convened a gathering of tech 
leaders in Paris and released a communiqué calling for tighter 
regulation of the Internet. On June 29, the international Organization 
for Economic Cooperation and Development issued a set of principles that 
called, in part, for ISPs and other intermediaries to monitor more 
online content. And in July, the Defense Department released its first 
plan for cyberspace, declaring the Internet a domain for war.

The goal of the Obama administration's International Strategy for 
Cyberspace seems benign and even bland: to keep the Internet "open, 
interoperable, secure, and reliable." The document links policies 
ranging from cybersecurity to Internet freedom and identifies "norms of 
responsible behavior" for governments around the world. "The world must 
collectively recognize the challenges posed by malevolent actors' entry 
into cyberspace, and update and strengthen our national and 
international policies accordingly," the strategy document concludes. 
"The future of an open, interoperable, secure, and reliable cyberspace 
depends on nations recognizing and safeguarding that which should endure 
while confronting those who would destabilize or undermine our 
increasingly networked world."

Even with the best of intentions, however, the United States and other 
democracies face a paradox: In their efforts to preserve an Internet 
that is both open and secure, governments often undermine access by 
overregulating. "States no longer fear pariah status by openly declaring 
their intent to regulate and control cyberspace," concluded the OpenNet 
Initiative's report. "The convenient rubric of terrorism, child 
pornography, and cybersecurity has contributed to a growing expectation 
that states should enforce order in cyberspace."


    FOREIGN POLICY BY OTHER MEANS

Antigovernment protesters filled Cairo's Tahrir Square in mostly 
peaceful demonstrations for days last winter, and by Feb. 2, the area 
was a teeming mass of humanity. Then, on that particular Wednesday, 
things changed. Thousands of supporters of Egyptian President Hosni 
Mubarak stormed into the square, swinging clubs and whips. The clash 
created a bizarre spectacle as protesters organized through social media 
and cell phones faced thugs riding on camels and horses in a street 
brawl broadcast around the world on cable television and the Internet. 
Pundits cast the almost medieval images from Tahrir Square as proof of 
the power of social media against an authoritarian regimes.

"There's no question that the ability of young activists in Egypt or 
Tunisia to organize themselves was dependent on not sitting in a coffee 
shop or hotel somewhere, but using the Internet and having access to 
each other online," said Michael Posner, assistant secretary of State 
for democracy, human rights, and labor, in an interview with /National 
Journal./ "So the potential is great, but precisely because it is great 
and it's so empowering, there's also greater risk."

That fact is not lost on governments. The United States is spending 
millions of dollars to develop anticensorship apps, build shadow 
communications systems, and train activists overseas how to beat Big 
Brother.

    "Some are ... consciously seeking to repeal" the freedom that
    allowed the Internet to develop. ---Leslie Harris, Center for
    Democracy and Technology

Not surprisingly, autocratic regimes have fought back with their own 
measures. The State Department's 2010 Human Rights Report cited the 
dramatic growth of communications technology as one of the most 
significant trends in human rights. But researchers also found that 
"more than 40 governments are now using a combination of regulatory 
restrictions, technical controls on access to the Internet, and 
technologies designed to repress speech and infringe on the personal 
privacy of those who use these rapidly evolving technologies."

The growing threat of Internet censorship, ranging from China's 
sophisticated firewalls to outright attacks on activists tracked down 
through their online trails, is prompting calls for more-concerted 
freedom initiatives. "The open Internet as it exists today did not come 
about by accident," warned the Center for Democracy and Technology in a 
recent report. "Today's Internet is possible because of very specific 
choices made in technology, policy, and law that encourage innovation 
and preserve the openness of the platform."

In many ways, the United States is active on both sides of the argument. 
On one hand, the Defense Department and the CIA are pouring billions of 
dollars into cyberwarfare and cyberespionage; the Homeland Security 
Department is beefing up cybertracking to head off potential terrorist 
attacks; and members of Congress are aiming to increase regulation of 
online privacy, intellectual property, and cybercrime. All of these 
efforts work to expand government's power.

On the other hand, the State Department is actively helping dissident 
groups in countries such as Libya to evade their government's Internet 
barriers. Those efforts have the potential to expand democracy.

"This is a new foreign-policy imperative," Christopher Painter, who 
became the State Department's first cyberpolicy coordinator, said in an 
interview with /National Journal./ "The decisions we make over the next 
year or two will define how the Internet looks for years." After years 
of approaching Internet issues as a cluster of separate technical 
problems, Painter said, governments and private-sector groups are 
recognizing that cybersecurity, privacy, copyright protections, and free 
speech are all connected. "All these topics are mutually dependent," 
Painter said. "You can't make policy without understanding that."


    JUST DON'T HELP TOO MUCH

In December 2010, an officer with the sheriff's regional electronics and 
computer investigations in Hamilton County, Ind., contacted 52-year-old 
Michael Bohannon online. Bohannon shared 41 files of suspected child 
pornography with the officer, and investigators ultimately uncovered 
more than 13,000 images and 6,000 videos of child pornography on the 
Cincinnati man's home computer. Even more disturbing, police realized 
that Bohannon had been convicted five years earlier of possessing child 
pornography and had served 40 months in prison.

It's a story repeated almost every day in crime blotters around the 
world, along with reports of international child-porn rings, and it's 
why the public supports law enforcement's authority to track suspected 
predators with whatever tools are available. Who wouldn't want to do 
everything possible to stop the sexual exploitation of children?

That's exactly what Reps. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, and Debbie Wasserman 
Schultz, D-Fla., argued at a House hearing in July. The pair was 
championing their Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act, 
which would require ISPs to collect and retain user data for at least a 
year. Opponents, including Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., warned that the 
bill could open a Pandora's box of government intrusion---from 
warrantless snooping on innocent people to mining all kinds of personal 
information. "This is not about child porn. It never has been and never 
will be," Issa said during committee debate. "This is a convenient way 
for law enforcement to get what they couldn't get in the Patriot Act."

Not surprisingly, many big corporate players on the Web are uneasy about 
government intervention in cyberspace. Google's Chairman, Eric Schmidt, 
fretted at the "e-G-8" meeting in Paris this May that governments might 
be getting ahead of themselves. "Technology will move faster than 
governments, so don't legislate before you understand the consequences," 
Schmidt warned the audience of political and technology industry leaders.

While few Internet users in Western countries face outright censorship, 
government officials are stepping up efforts to prevent cybercrime, 
protect privacy, and crack down on copyright infringement. Germany and 
Canada, among others countries, have also used hate-speech laws to go 
after Internet service providers that knowingly host illegal content.

    The Internet has great potential to empower democratic movements,
    "but ... there's also greater risk." ---Michael Posner

As early as 2000, a French court ordered Yahoo to block French users 
from an online auction site offering Nazi memorabilia. This June, ISPs 
in Australia took matters into their own hands and restricted access to 
a list of 500 websites, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 
which advocates Internet freedom. "While some filtering at a private 
level can be a good thing, such as keeping kids from accessing 
undesirable content online, government-level filtering does more harm 
than good," said Jillian York, the foundation's director for 
international freedom of expression. "What happens when the filters go 
after politically sensitive content? Will anyone object then?"

Over the past year, cyberspace experienced a surge in government 
interference, restrictions on the flow of information, and disputes over 
how Internet traffic is exchanged, noted Larry Strickling, assistant 
secretary of Commerce for communications and information, speaking at a 
Georgetown University Law Center event in July. "All of these events 
only strengthen my view that now is truly a time for all to get involved 
who are concerned about maintaining a vibrant and growing Internet and 
who want to preserve established global Internet institutions," he said.

In the United States, power struggles over the Internet are under way on 
many fronts. Various proposals making their way through Congress would 
enact sweeping changes to laws governing cybersecurity, online privacy, 
and protection of intellectual property. Each fight, regardless of the 
specifics, has the potential to change the balance of control between 
the government, the communications industry, and private individuals. 
The Global Online Freedom Act, reintroduced in April after languishing 
since 2006, would require technology companies to receive permission 
from U.S. officials before complying with restrictive foreign 
governments. Critics of the legislation---notably, businesses that do 
business with such governments---charge that it is autocratic of the 
United States to try to control what other governments want them to do.

Reps. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Joe Barton, R-Texas, have proposed a 
measure that would require websites and online services to abide by 
strict privacy rules for children under 12. Among other things, the bill 
would prohibit Web companies from tracking a child's online browsing. 
But some civil-liberties activists say the bill would actually reduce 
privacy because Internet companies would need to collect even personal 
information to determine if a user is a child.

Government efforts to protect against hacking present some of the 
greatest challenges to Internet freedom, analysts say. Legislation 
proposed by the top members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee 
<http://topics.nationaljournal.com/Senate+Homeland+Security+Committee/> 
would give the federal government the authority to enforce cybersecurity 
and would push the private sector to establish "best practices" against 
hackers. When civil-rights groups complained that the measure would give 
the executive branch too much power in the event of a major cyberattack, 
the bill's sponsors added language that explicitly bars the president 
from using any kind of "kill switch" to shut down the Internet.

Some policymakers, including former Director of National Intelligence 
Mike McConnell, have proposed measures to beef up security by making it 
easier to track and identify people online. But cyberlibertarians oppose 
any such steps. "A 'reengineered,' more secure Internet is likely a very 
different Internet than the open and innovative network we know today," 
warned George Mason University researchers Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins 
in a recent paper. "It might be an Internet on which information flows 
are much more easily controlled by government and in which anonymity is 
impossible, posing a threat to free speech. A capability to track and 
attribute malicious activities could just as easily be employed to track 
and control any other type of activity."


    BIG BUSINESS VERSUS BIG BROTHER

Perhaps the most heavily lobbied open-Internet battle in the United 
States centers on network-neutrality regulations designed to reduce 
anticompetitive behavior over broadband networks. The rules, which the 
Federal Communications Commission approved in December, prohibit 
Internet service providers from blocking or slowing access to certain 
websites. For supporters, usually on the liberal side of the political 
fence, net-neutrality regulations are vital to ensuring that 
corporations don't restrict Internet access. Without restrictions, they 
say, ISPs could charge Yahoo for the opportunity to have its search site 
load faster than Google's, or could block start-ups from entering the 
market. Conservative critics decry the rules as tantamount to a 
government takeover of the Internet. Even before the regulations took 
effect, they were challenged in court, and the House voted to overturn them.

The brawl highlights a vexing subtext of the online-freedom debate: Who 
is best suited to protect the free use of the Internet? The Net's 
traditional champions leaned libertarian, worrying primarily about 
government control. But giant corporations essentially dominate the 
Internet today, and many of them have access to vast amounts of personal 
data. Facebook alone boasts more than 750 million active users (if 
Facebook was a country, it would be the third-most populous in the 
world), and Google recently became the first website to attract 1 
billion visits a month. Like Washington, the cyberindustry seems to 
straddle both sides of the argument over Internet freedom.

"People tell me, 'On the one hand, it's great you played such a big role 
in the Arab Spring, but it's also kind of scary because you enable all 
this sharing and collect information on people,' " Facebook founder and 
CEO Mark Zuckerberg, told the e-G-8 assembly. "It's hard to have one 
without the other.... You can't isolate some things you like about the 
Internet and control other things that you don't."

Many in the business community and in civil-society organizations are 
hoping that self-regulation will stave off government mandates. The 
Global Network Initiative, a coalition of human-rights groups and 
industry giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, was established in 
2008 to develop guidelines for operating within authoritarian countries. 
The idea, not always embraced during the heat of competition, is that 
Western companies shouldn't provide the tools for political repression.

Meanwhile, though, the communications and tech sectors face mounting 
calls in democratic countries for government intervention to fight 
cyberattacks, data breaches, invasive marketing, child pornography, and 
hate speech.

Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit advocacy group for citizen 
rights in cyber­space, said that some degree of government control is 
inevitable. "As long as there are people sitting at the keyboards, 
governments will have a role to play," he said. "People still live in 
the real world, and in the real world, governments are still in charge."


    IS INTERNET ACCESS A HUMAN RIGHT?

Rafal Rohozinski is riding the Internet freedom wave. As a top executive 
of Psiphon, a Web proxy service based in Canada that allows people 
around the world to circumvent Internet firewalls and avoid censorship, 
Rohozinski was among the first to receive some of the $15 million in 
grants from the State Department to support Internet freedom in 2008. 
Now, the company is one of several that contract with the Broadcasting 
Board of Governors, an independent government agency, to help 
international users access U.S. government news content. Since then, the 
department has handed out $35 million in similar grants for 
anticensorship technology, software, and activist training. But that's 
just the beginning. Inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings, Congress 
included an extra $20 million in its most recent continuing budget 
resolution for the State Department's Internet freedom programs, as well 
as $10 million for the Broadcasting Board of Governors' circumvention 
contractors.

The parallel growth of government control and government spending to 
block censorship is no coincidence. "We are experiencing a tectonic 
shift," Rohozinski says. "As more and more people come online, it 
becomes more political. It used to be just for geeks. Now we're moving 
way beyond that." At the heart of that change, he says, is the growing 
number of young people online and the explosion of Internet use outside 
the United States. "The epicenter of cyberspace is shifting," he said.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton highlighted the growing stakes 
in a landmark speech on Internet freedom earlier this year. "The 
Internet has become the public space of the 21st century---the world's 
town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub," she 
said. "We need to have a serious conversation about the principles that 
will guide us. What rules exist and should not exist, and why? What 
behaviors should be encouraged or discouraged, and how?"

The problem, Clinton's senior adviser Alec Ross has said, is that no 
international norms govern access to the Internet. In June, United 
Nations special rapporteur Frank La Rue concluded that access is a human 
right and should be protected as such. "Given that the Internet has 
become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, 
combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress," 
La Rue wrote in a report in May to the U.N.'s Human Rights Council, 
"ensuring universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all 
states."

These declarations from the United States and the United Nations have 
heartened civil-rights advocates and the information-technology industry 
alike, in part because they concede that the technology itself doesn't 
guarantee immunity from repression. As Google's Eric Schmidt remarked at 
a Santa Barbara, Calif.,  conference in May, "If you're willing to shoot 
enough people and to kill enough people, you can beat the Internet."




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