Internet Censorship: A Story from Azerbaijan
By Narmin Mammadsoy, Research Assistant, Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity
The Internet Atlas, a project of the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity’s Daylight Lab, measures long-term structural risks to the global internet. We produce openly available, reproducible indicators to identify points of strength and weakness at various levels of the internet “stack.”
One major structural risk to the world wide web is that core internet protocols and infrastructures make it far too easy for repressive regimes to block access to content. Transport Layer Security (TLS) can make the destination of packets visible to infrastructure operators, allowing them to drop inbound or outbound data. National bottlenecks can constrict international data flows, lowering barriers to certain types of monitoring. This gives government-run infrastructure providers, or operators who have no choice but to comply with a particular regime’s rules, relatively fine-grained control over the types of content their citizens can access online.
In the article below, Narmin Mammadsoy, a research assistant with the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, details internet censorship in Azerbaijan through the lens of her personal experiences.
In 2000, my dad, a human rights activist, started a non-profit organization to raise awareness about human rights issues in Azerbaijan, our home country. As a result, he spent time in jail and was physically attacked for his work. By 2012, my dad was calling attention to other grave issues, such as officials purposefully killing army soldiers in order to sell their organs through the black market. My father held press conferences with the parents of these soldiers, and was interviewed by journalists for articles that were published in newspapers and websites.
That’s when my family started to face more pressure. A lot of government officials were involved in the black market. They made fortunes by selling the soldiers’ organs. We started to receive anonymous calls from unknown numbers. At that time, a lot of human rights activists in Azerbaijan were being arrested and sent to prison for years because of their political views.
One night in 2013, my dad came and told me, my siblings, and my mom that we had to take everything and leave. We fled to Ukraine as political refugees, and in 2016 we were moved to the United States by the United Nations.
Azerbaijani President, Ilham Aliyev, has been ruling the country since 2003. He assumed power following the death of his father, Heydar Aliyev. The country has been under the rule of Ilham Aliyev and his inner circle for almost 20 years now.
In 2017, a court in Azerbaijan made the decision to block several independent websites. Those websites included some of the most important independent news media sites, such as Meydan TV, OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Unit), Azadliq Radio (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Azerbaijani Service), Kanal13, and several others.
While Azerbaijan authorities’ reasoning is that these websites pose a threat to Azerbaijan’s national security, their actual goal is to suppress information that could be embarrassing to the regime’s interests.
One of the blocked websites is Meydan TV, a Berlin-based independent online multimedia platform. This non-profit outlet was founded in 2013 by Emin Milli, a human rights activist from Azerbaijan. As an independent reporting organization, Meydan TV reports on issues concerning Azerbaijani society in Russian, Azerbaijani, and English.
Another blocked website is Azadliq Radio (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Azerbaijani Service), which is a United States-funded organization that calls attention to issues in Azerbaijan and is often critical of that country’s authoritarian regime .
OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Unit), is also on the list of blocked websites. OCCRP, an investigative reporting platform for a global network of independent media centers and journalists, has posted articles about president Ilham Aliyev and other government authorities’ bribery, suspicious funds, and money laundering,
While all the traditional news media platforms in the country are controlled by the authorities in Azerbaijan, these independent news media sources provide an objective view on the issues in the country. Hence, they are being blocked. Try to access these pages from within Azerbaijan, and they simply will not load (see screenshot).
From a technical standpoint, there are a variety of methods for blocking webpages. According to the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), Azerbaijan appears to use its jurisdiction over internet service providers (ISPs) to block the websites listed above, effectively ordering those providers to cause connections to those websites to time out.
Not only does Azerbaijan block access to these news websites, it has also attempted to block the use of tools designed to circumvent internet censorship. Examples of censorship circumvention tools include Tor and Psiphon. These tools hide the destination of traffic from the ISPs that would otherwise block them. The most recent data available from the OONI indicate that people in Azerbaijan can use Psiphon to bypass the restrictions on the internet.
Overcoming censorship requires active participation on the ground. While the Internet Atlas’s work is to illuminate and localize risks to the internet, the most effective thing we can do is equip activists to inform themselves. In that spirit, we provide instructions below on how to download Psiphon for your platform.
Download Psiphon
If you are an activist or concerned citizen in Azerbaijan, you can download Psiphon to access these websites. Here’s a link to download Psiphon for Windows, Mac and Android (AZ). Refer to this article for instructions on how to run Psiphon on your mobile phone (Android and iOS).
