Internet Censorship and Monitoring

What is Internet?
The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.

What is Censorship?
Censorship is suppression of speech or other communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the general body of people as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body.

What is Monitoring?
Monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a website or web application. Website monitoring is often used by businesses to ensure that their sites are live and responding.
Monitoring is also used to verify that a domain (and web site) is not only responding properly, but has not been hacked, blacklisted or hijacked.

What is Internet Censorship?
Internet censorship is control or suppression of the publishing or accessing of information on the Internet. The legal issues are similar to offline censorship. One difference is that national borders are more permeable online: residents of a country that bans certain information can find it on websites hosted outside the country. A government can try to prevent its citizens from viewing these even if it has no control over the websites themselves.

INTERNET CENSORSHIP

Censorship plays a major role in every society and as Shakespeare once said, “censorship is an art made tongue-tied by authority”, but it is not only used to silence people but also to protect them. Nowadays, censorship is only imposed on those beliefs that have in history resulted in tragedies, therefore ideologies such as Nazism etc. are forbidden to be expressed in public. Although it is often misused, censorship is supposed to help people and protect them from dangerous concepts and their children from violence and pornography.

Censorship has always been used as a tool for controlling the society. Citizens are usually united when they face a common enemy or when they strive for achieving a common goal. Censoring certain content and promoting other is the best way to achieve that and therefore fool the citizens that they do what they want to do. It was often used to hide the content that is dangerous when interpreted incorrectly or by inappropriate people. But this can also go the other way around.

In democracy, censorship is limited to the protection of the citizens by either banning some explicit content from being published, covering unsuitable material or just by labeling it with age restrictions. That is why films, TV programmes, video games, books and magazines are nowadays rated according to age restrictions or intended audience.

Although it was meant in the beginning to serve a good purpose, along with the time it started to be used to control the information and the society. In the world we live in today, there is no chance that it is used only in good intentions, because just as not everyone is fundamentally good, not everyone will use it for good, but for their own profit.

TYPES OF INTERNET CENSORSHIP
1. Considering the severity countries practice the Internet censorship, we can discuss about a classification system that categorizes countries as:
• Pervasive. This includes countries that practice the most extreme level of censorship. Some nations included in this category are Iran, Burma and China
• Substantial. South Korea, Yemen and Saudi Arabia are a few countries included in this category.
• Nominal/Selective. Selective Internet censorship is applied in countries like Australia, Canada and India.
• Watchlist/Suspected. Countries like Morocco, Norway and Russia are only suspected for applying Internet censorship, at least for this moment.

2. Another method for classification is based on the commonly targeted content countries choose to block:
• Political. Websites classified as political include content that strays from the political view of the government. This category also includes human rights, freedom of expression, minority rights, religion freedom or other social causes that restrictive governments attempt to control.
• Social. These sites are related to sexuality, gambling, drugs and other subjects that could be deemed as offensive by a nation.
• Security. This category includes websites considered to provide content related to armed conflict, border disputes, separatist movements, militant groups, wars/skirmishes, dissent or other types of conflicts.
• Internet tools. This classification includes websites used to circumvent censorship, anonymous proxy surfing, language translation websites, or sites that promote the use of Instant Messaging, e-mail services, Internet hosting or telephone services.

3. Considering the methods used for censoring the Internet content we have the following technical censorship:
• IP blocking - access to a certain IP address is denied.
• DNS filtering and redirection.
• URL filtering - scan the requested URL string for target keywords regardless of the domain name specified in the URL.
• Packet filtering - terminate TCP packet transmissions when a certain number of controversial keywords are detected.
• Connection reset - if a previous TCP connection is blocked by the filter, future connection attempts from both sides will also be blocked.
• Web feed blocking - incoming URLs starting with "rss", "feed", or "blog" are blocked.
• Reverse surveillance - Computers accessing certain websites, including Google, are automatically exposed to reverse scanning from the ISP in an apparent attempt to extract further information.
Beside the government restrictive measures, many companies censor and monitor the Internet usage within their offices. Websites considered to be leisure and not related to the employees' working environment are blocked by the business owners.

INTERNET CENSORSHIP PROS AND CONS

Most of the progressive groups are of the opinion that Internet censorship to an extent is justified, but the onus is on the government to ensure that it doesn't hamper the freedom of press or result in systematic repression of Internet users. The points mentioned below are the Internet Censorship Pros and Cons.

Internet Censorship Pros
Advocates of Internet censorship argue that there has to be some regulation on this medium of mass media - the absence of which can result in some serious implications of the society. Even other means of mass media - such as television and books, have censoring authorities which implies that there is no problem in having such authorities monitoring what is being published on the Internet. Irrespective of whether it is on the television or on Internet, racial comments and pornography can never be justified. It may be easier to trace a person who uses television as a medium to spread hatred or porn, but it is very difficult to do so, on the Internet with no boundaries whatsoever. The fact that the chances of being traced are very rare makes many resort to various criminal activities, right from sexual exploitation of children to running drug cartels from a particular part of the world, on the Internet. While laws pertaining to various Internet crimes do exist, it is very difficult to book a person on such charges - especially if he is not from the same country. The rising number of crimes validates this very fact, and advocates of Internet censorship cite this as one of the most prominent reason in their justification of Internet regulation.

Internet Censorship Cons
According to the critics of Internet censorship, it is a blatant violation of Internet privacy and freedom of press - which is used by authoritative administration to suppress the effectiveness of this means of mass media. The critics also question the idea of Internet Service Providers deciding what to put on the Internet and what to omit, as the chances of these service providers being biased cannot be ruled out. As far as government regulation is concerned, the government can only regulate what is going on in their country, but it is very difficult to regulate web pages which are generated from other countries. On the legal front, the owners of these websites can sue the administration over blocking their websites as well. While that may seldom work in non-democratic countries, it is an effective tool for such companies in democratic countries. At the same time, such censorship is also bound to come heavy on taxpayers pocket because the government will have to put in more funds to tackle new concepts of Internet technology, such as proxy server, which keep on changing every now and then.

The administration needs to take these Internet censorship pros and cons into consideration when implementing any such restrictions on the Internet. Evaluation of these pros and cons Internet regulation reveals that such restrictions can be used as well as misused. While the pros of Internet censorship may make you believe that this is the need of this hour, its cons are bound to make you feel that such concepts don't have place in democracy. While the problem is at its peak in countries with non-democratic government, the demons of Internet censorship do raise their heads every once in a while in democratic countries as well.

INTERNET/WEBSITE MONITORING
Internet/Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a website or web application. Website monitoring is often used by businesses to ensure that their sites are live and responding. Website Security monitoring is also used to verify that a domain (and web site) is not only responding properly, but has not been hacked, blacklisted or hijacked. Multiple tools are available to automate site availability checks and security checks.
What for?
Monitoring is essential to ensure that a website is available to users and downtime is minimized. Users that rely on a website or an application for work or pleasure will get frustrated or even stop using the application if it is not reliably available. Monitoring can cover many things that an application needs to function, like network connectivity, Domain Name System records, database connectivity, bandwidth, and computer resources like free RAM, CPU load, disk space, events, etc. Commonly measured metrics are response time and availability (or uptime), but consistency and reliability metrics are gaining popularity. Measuring a website's availability and reliability under various amounts of traffic is often referred to as load testing.
Inside or outside monitoring
Website monitoring can be done from both inside and outside of a corporate firewall. Traditional Network Management solutions focus on inside the firewall monitoring, whereas external performance monitoring will test and monitor performance issues across the Internet backbone and in some cases all the way to the end-user.
Inside firewall monitoring is done by special hardware appliances which can help you determine if your internal applications’ sluggish performance is caused by: design of applications, internal infrastructure, internal applications or connections to any public internet.
External performance monitoring is also known as end-user monitoring or end-to-end performance monitoring. Real measures the performance and availability experienced by actual users, diagnoses individual incidents, and tracks the impact of a change.
Internet monitoring can happen in such a manner that you probably might not even come to know that your internet connection or website that you surf is being monitored through your IP (internet protocol) address.

INTERNET CENSORSHIP IN INDIA

Censorship in India mainly targets religious issues. The Constitution of India guarantees freedom of expression but places certain restrictions on content, with a view towards maintaining communal and religious harmony, given the history of communal tension in the nation.
In 2004, a Yahoo! Groups discussion group was blocked because of fears the group, the Kynhun forum, had links with banned separatists. The ban resulted in the entire Yahoo! Groups being banned due to the internet service providers' inability to implement a sub-group ban, and hence a huge range of harmless material were made inaccessible. The government used new information technology laws to force Indian internet service providers to block the forum after Yahoo! refused to comply. The ban sparked outrage and led to many people calling for the ban to be lifted. Concerns have been voiced that despite the inherent power of ruling bodies, the actions of the Indian government are actually illegal
In 2001, the Bombay High Court appointed a Committee to oversee issues relating to cyber pornography and Cybercrime. Report of the Committee, Appointed by the Bombay High Court. The Court invited the petitioners Jayesh Thakkar and Sunil Thacker as special invitees to provide their inputs and recommendations on cyber laws. The Committee upon identifying key issues made recommendations such as licensing of Cyber cafe, introducing identity cards for Cyber cafe visitors, ensure that Cyber Cafe that have cubicles or partitions be required to ensure that minors are not allowed to use machines in cubicles or behind partitions, mandatory maintaining of IP logs by cyber cafe, and so on. The Committee made several other recommendations such as connectivity and authentication at Internet service provider level which provided that Internet service providers were responsible for time clock coordination and record keeping. The report addressed the issue of protecting minor children from accessing adult sites and made a recommendation that Internet Service Providers must protective parental software with every Internet connection. The committee placed a special emphasis on lack of technical knowledge in the police and recommended special training of cyber cops. The report of the committee was well accepted by the Courts and is being put in to practice by the Police and Cyber cafes jointly.
India has blocked Internet access to several blogs and web sites in July 2006 because of the 11 July 2006 Mumbai train bombings. As with the Yahoo! Groups case, the government had wished for a few blogs to be banned for spreading "hateful or inflammatory" material, but the internet service providers were either unable to ban a few blogs selectively or found it easier to block all the blogs directly. After outrage, blog service was restored within a few days.
Though, the censorship in India is considered nominal compared to other countries like China. China's Internet censorship is regarded by many as the most pervasive and sophisticated in the world. According to a Harvard study, at least 18,000 websites are blocked from within the country. Banned sites have included YouTube, Facebook (from July 2009) and Flickr. Certain search engine terms are blocked as well, and 52 cyber dissidents are reportedly imprisoned in China for their online communications. More recently, through individual negotiations with the Chinese government, Wikipedia, Google and YouTube have been opened up for public viewing with certain restrictions for those who access these sites from within mainland China. Although China has opened up Google for public viewing, it is google.cn as opposed to google.com. This Google follows China's set rules for what is allowed to be shown through a Google search. All versions of YouTube have been completely unavailable in China since April 2009.
Reporters in the western media have also suggested that China's internet censorship of foreign websites may also be a means of forcing mainland Chinese users to rely on China's own e-commerce industry, thus self-insulating their economy.