Deibert, Palfrey, Rohozinski, Zittrain (eds.): Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace (2010)

Internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online surveillance are increasing in scale, scope, and sophistication around the world, in democratic countries as well as in authoritarian states. The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China’s famous “Great Firewall of China” is one of the first national Internet filtering systems. Today the new tools for Internet controls that are emerging go beyond mere denial of information. These new techniques, which aim to normalize (or even legalize) Internet control, include targeted viruses and the strategically timed deployment of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, surveillance at key points of the Internet’s infrastructure, take-down notices, stringent terms of usage policies, and national information shaping strategies. Access Controlled reports on this new normative terrain.

The book, a project from the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a collaboration of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the SecDev Group, offers six substantial chapters that analyze Internet control in both Western and Eastern Europe and a section of shorter regional reports and country profiles drawn from material gathered by the ONI around the world through a combination of technical interrogation and field research methods.

Chapter authors: Ronald Deibert, Colin Maclay, John Palfrey, Hal Roberts, Rafal Rohozinski, Nart Villeneuve, Ethan Zuckerman

Editors Ronald Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, Jonathan Zittrain
Publisher MIT Press, 2010
Information Revolution and Global Politics series
ISBN 0262514354, 9780262514354
656 pages

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PDF (PDF chapters, Part 1)
PDF (PDF chapters, Part 2)

Access Denied. The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (2008)

Many countries around the world block or filter Internet content, denying access to information—often about politics, but also relating to sexuality, culture, or religion—that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens. Access Denied documents and analyzes Internet filtering practices in over three dozen countries, offering the first rigorously conducted study of this accelerating trend.

Internet filtering takes place in at least forty states worldwide including many countries in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Related Internet content control mechanisms are also in place in Canada, the United States and a cluster of countries in Europe. Drawing on a just-completed survey of global Internet filtering undertaken by the OpenNet Initiative (a collaboration of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, and the University of Cambridge) and relying on work by regional experts and an extensive network of researchers, Access Denied examines the political, legal, social, and cultural contexts of Internet filtering in these states from a variety of perspectives. Chapters discuss the mechanisms and politics of Internet filtering, the strengths and limitations of the technology that powers it, the relevance of international law, ethical considerations for corporations that supply states with the tools for blocking and filtering, and the implications of Internet filtering for activist communities that increasingly rely on Internet technologies for communicating their missions.

Reports on Internet content regulation in forty different countries follow, with each country profile outlining the types of content blocked by category and documenting key findings.

Contributors: Ross Anderson, Malcolm Birdling, Ronald Deibert, Robert Faris, Vesselina Haralampieva, Steven Murdoch, Helmi Noman, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, Mary Rundle, Nart Villeneuve, Stephanie Wang, and Jonathan Zittrain

Edited by Ronald J. Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski and Jonathan Zittrain
Publisher MIT Press, 2008
Series: Information revolution & global politics
ISBN 0262541963, 9780262541961
Length 449 pages

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FlossManuals.net: Circumvention Tools. How to Bypass Internet Censorship (2009/2011)

A book describes circumvention tools and explains why you might want to use them, and honestly describes the risks you must consider before circumventing blockers or monitors. Blockers and monitors restrict access to areas of the Internet, and this book describes simple techniques for bypassing those restrictions.

The growth of the Internet has been paralleled by attempts to control how people use it, motivated by a desire to protect children, businesses, personal information, the capacity of networks, or moral interests, for example. Some of these concerns involve allowing people to control their own experience of the Internet (for instance, letting people use spam-filtering tools to prevent spam from being delivered to their own e-mail accounts), but others involve restricting how other people can use the Internet and what those other people can and can’t access. The latter case causes significant conflicts and disagreements when the people whose access is restricted don’t agree that the blocking is appropriate or in their interest. Problems also arise when blocking mechanisms and filters reduce access to useful business, health, educational, and other information.

Because of concerns about the effect of internet blocking mechanisms, and the implications of censorship, many individuals and groups are working hard to ensure that the Internet, and the information on it, are freely available to everyone who wants it. There is a vast amount of energy, from commercial, non-profit and volunteer groups, devoted to creating tools and techniques to bypass Internet censorship. Some techniques require no special software, just a knowledge of where to look for the same information. Programmers have developed a variety of more capable tools, which address different types of filtering and blocking. These tools, often called “circumvention tools” help Internet users access information that they might not otherwise be able to see. This book documents simple circumvention techniques such as a cached file or web proxy, and also describes more complex methods using Tor, which stands for The Onion Router, involving a sophisticated network of proxy servers.

This manual has content that was largely written at a Book Sprint. The Book Sprint was held in the beautiful hills of Upper New York State in the US. Eight people worked together over an intensive five-day period to produce the book. It is a living document of course and is available online for free, where you can also edit it and improve it.

Published FlossManuals.net, 2011-03-10
240 pages
GNU General Public License version 2

project website (added on 28-5-2011)
FlossManuals page (updated on 28-5-2011)

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