The Renesys blog entry is short, and promises updates. From the Renesys blog:

Starting at 10:26 UTC (12:26pm in Damascus), Syria’s international Internet connectivity shut down. In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria’s IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet.

Cutting off entire countries form the global Internet has become a strategy employed by some governments in times of civil unrest — and underscores many of the weak points of the Internet itself. Both Libya, Iran and Egypt pulled much of their connections to the web world offline in the last two years. We explained how Egypt took the country offline in this post:

The OpenNet Initiative has outlined two methods by which most nations could enact such shutdowns. Essentially, officials can either close down the routers which direct traffic over the border — hermetically sealing the country from outsiders — or go further down the chain and switch off routers at individual ISPs to prevent access for most users inside.

At the time Egypt took the second route to take the country offline, a process made easier by the fact that their were few ISPs to contact. It’s unclear how Syria disconnected its citizens. Some news reports say insurgents are communicating still via satellite phones, but the lost of IP addresses means no IP services can find their way to end users within the country. When a packet destined for a Syrian IP address is sent, it simply can’t find out where it’s supposed to go.

Update: Here’s what that drop off in traffic looks like, courtesy of Akamai.

This is one reason that technologies such as OpenBTS, Commotion, the Serval Project and other technologies to build out open source communications networks are important. While those may not ensure that people in Syria can talk to the outside world unless they have a satellite backhaul, they could still communicate with one another independently of the local ISPs.

Photo courtesy of <a href=”2lights.net / Shutterstock.com“>Shutterstock user 2lights.net.

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The clip that is being blocked is a 14-minute section of a longer film called “The Innocence of Muslims,” which reportedly shows a fictional attack by Muslims on a Christian family, followed by an account of the origins of the Islamic religion that portrays the prophet Muhammad as a fraud and a womanizer. Other fictional and/or humorous accounts of the prophet’s life have also caused violence in the past, including a fatwa or death sentence issued against author Salman Rushdie in 1989 for his book “The Satanic Verses,” and a series of attacks and deaths linked to offensive cartoons about the prophet that ran in a Danish newspaper in 2005.

It’s not clear the video is connected to the attack

In this case, the video clip has been connected to the death of U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens, who was killed on Tuesday in an attack on the embassy in Libya, along with three other members of the ambassador’s diplomatic staff. And in a statement released to the news media, Google made it clear that this is the main reason it decided to block access to the video from viewers in Egypt and Libya (attacks also occurred in Cairo that were linked to the clip). Said the company:

“This video — which is widely available on the Web — is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube. However, given the very difficult situation in Libya and Egypt, we have temporarily restricted access in both countries. Our hearts are with the families of the people murdered in yesterday’s attack in Libya.”

However, while many of the reports from mainstream media sources about the deaths in Libya have linked it to the video, CNN has said that the embassy attack was actually planned well in advance by members of an extremist group connected to al-Qaeda and was not directly connected to the clip, according to the news network’s sources. As more than one person has pointed out, blocking access to a video from a specific country is also quite easy to get around, even for a technically-challenged viewer — and as Google itself noted, the offending video is available on any number of other websites apart from YouTube. So why bother censoring it?

In the past, Google has fought hard against attempts by governments in countries such as Turkey to censor the content on YouTube, and in many cases those countries have responded by blocking the website entirely (as Afghanistan said it had done on Wednesday in response to the Muhammad video). The company maintains a database of these kinds of requests from governments as part of its “transparency report,” and even when it does agree to remove certain kinds of content from either YouTube or its search results — as it does in countries like Germany, where Nazi-related commentary is illegal — it does so under protest.

Should Google alone be making the decision to censor?

Jillian York, the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in an email to me that allowing even controversial videos like the Muhammad clip to remain online was an important principle for Google and YouTube to uphold, despite the connection to violence:

“It definitely troubles me… I think it’s wrong of Google to play Internet police here. They shouldn’t censor without a court order.”

The Libyan video case reinforces how much control companies like Google and YouTube have over what kinds of content we can see and when, and more importantly where. Even Twitter said earlier this year that it has the ability to block access to specific tweets on a country-by-country basis — although the company said that it would only exercise that power as a last resort when asked to do so by a court or government. As we’ve discussed before, this kind of control over information in the hands of a few corporate information gatekeepers raises a host of important questions about freedom of speech in a digital age.

Google’s decision to block the video clip may have been made with the best of intentions, but if the connection between the violence and the video is as flimsy as it seems — and if no government, court or other external authority has requested that it be censored — then why take this kind of step in the first place? All it does is highlight the fact that the company can remove or block content any time it wishes to, regardless of whether doing so is ethically or legally justifiable. And that is a troubling prospect indeed.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Hoggarazzi and Petteri Sulonen

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Weakness at the border

We may think of Internet communication as this global network without borders, but there are still plenty of geographical borders in place thanks to how countries broadcast IP addresses and who owns the ISPs. For example in Libya, the state owns the only telecommunications provider inside the country, giving the government freedom to limit traffic both to the outside world and to areas inside the country. In March, the government stopped some residents from accessing the web, and it’s unclear who might be in control at the state-owned communications company that’s causing the Internet in Libya to sputter online.

Egypt, which in January cut off access to the web, took down its Internet by essentially making the country’s IP addresses invisible to the routing tables that direct web traffic around the world, shutting down the method by which telecommunications firms advertise their presence. It pressed five communications companies to comply with the government’s wishes. This strategy isn’t without risks, as it’s fairly clear when a government begins denying access to its people, but it’s also risky because it may have unintended consequences. In 2008, Pakistan ended up shutting off YouTube access  for the world for a few hours, instead of merely blocking the service within its borders, because it decided to mess with the global routing tables that tell packets where they’re supposed to go on the web.

The solution here? Wireless broadcasting via satellite phones or projects such as building open technology to create mesh networks can help the few, but the many will likely stay offline. It’s also worth noting that killing the addresses available for routing tables takes care of IP traffic, but to disable text and voice calls from a cellular network governments might have to shut down the mobile operator or block them.

Weaknesses at the network operator

Even if the government has no interest in taking people offline, network operators might. For example, the BART protests earlier this month apparently so freaked out the San Francisco transit organization that it shut off cellular access inside the tunnels and stations. In a statement released Saturday, Bob Franklin, president of the BART board of directors, said:

BART’s temporary interruption of cell phone service was not intended to and did not affect any First Amendment rights of any person to protest in a lawful manner in areas at BART stations that are open for expressive activity. The interruption did prevent the planned coordination of illegal activity on the BART platforms, and the resulting threat to public safety.

The Federal Communications Commission is already looking into this action, and may disagree with BART, but the bottom line here is that BART owned those base stations and felt secure turning them off because it deemed the public was at risk. A more interesting scenario would be if Verizon, for example, shut off access to phones in areas where its workers were on strike last week in order to disrupt their activities. Additionally, one could view Vodafone’s capitulation in Egypt, when it shut down its service, as a weakness at the operator level, although because governments grant wireless licenses, they have a powerful say in how mobile operators run their businesses.

Failures and limits built into devices

Americans may not realize it, but between devices and OS limitations, many people in the U.S. are accepting a limit on their broadband access when it comes to tethering their phones or even when trying to run different software on their devices, either to run them on other carriers’ networks or to try to add additional functionality. Carriers defend this practice, because it helps them understand the behavior of devices on their networks and maintain control.

When it comes to charging more for tethering, consumer groups decry it as making people pay more for delivering what is essentially the same access to the web. Because higher costs can keep some people off the web, or control how they access content, it limits access to broadband in ways that are not as obvious as a government shutting off access, but still can influence who gets online and what they see.

Acts of God and old women

And lest we only blame authoritarian governments and corporations, it’s worth recalling that the Internet has a physical infrastructure that can get cut by earthquakes, angry kraken and even old women looking for gold. Hurricanes and earthquakes can take out wireless networks plunging citizens back into the dark old days of snail mail, wireline access and carrier pigeons. So no matter if broadband access is a human right, protected as a mechanism for free speech or completely corrupted to serve the status quo, it’s also wise to have a backup plan.

Egypt image courtesy of Flickr user Muhammed Ghafari. BART image courtesy of Flickr user ol slambert.

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Libya also started to block access to YouTube as soon as the protests started last week, and access has been spotty at best ever since. Here’s a graph from Google’s Transparency Tool that clearly shows traffic dropping after Feb. 16, the day the uprising started in the eastern part of the country:

Many videos documenting the violence in Libya nonetheless find their way to YouTube. A Google spokesperson said on Tuesday that more than 9500 videos tagged “Libya” have been uploaded to the video site in the week since the beginning of the uprising.

YouTube has been experimenting with the news curation startup Storyful to make sense of these videos and highlight some of the submissions as part of its Citizentube project, and Storyful Editorial Director David Clinch told me much of the video has been uploaded with the help of Libyan expats. “Most are mirrored,” he said. Libyans occasionally have access to services like Facebook or Twitvid, and volunteers immediately take clips available on those services and upload them to YouTube.

Libyans seem to be quite aware that online video is playing a huge role in telling their side of the story, and they’re going to great lengths to circumvent the media blackout. “They are all pushing the videos out so the world can see them,” Clinch told me, adding that some clips are even “physically crossing borders.” Footage makes it out of the country in the luggage of refugees, despite security checks like the ones reported by Robertson, and Time Magazine even reported about organized sneakernets this week. It quoted one opposition member saying:

“We sent my brother and his friend to Marsa Matruh [in Egypt] to use the Internet. I went to Egypt every day to give him a flash disk full of media from Tobruk, al-Baida, Benghazi. They were videos from mobiles. Not just mine. We made copies, went to the Egyptian border at Salloum and gave it to someone there…”

Storyful is using contacts within Libya as well as expats to vet and contextualize the footage coming out of the country. That process can be complicated by the fact that some of the footage appears online without any meta-data whatsoever, but Clinch said that he has “a very high degree of confidence” in the videos curated by his company. CNN, Al-Jazeera and others have been using the very same footage that first showed up on YouTube to report about the situation in Libya, and Clinch said that in a few years, YouTube may be a prime source to learn how the uprising in Libya started.

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