Hong Kong Needs the Internet Now More Than Ever: We Are Monitoring It, Live
With the first major street protests against a draft extradition bill on June 9, protests and civic action in Hong Kong have continued for over a month. During this time, the Monash University IP-Observatory has been observing the availability and latency of the internet in 17 districts of Hong Kong, collecting over 5 million observations. Last night, we started pushing our live observations to our public dashboard for all the world to see.
Will China #KeepItOn?
Since June 9, the world has watched as Hong Kong citizens turn out in their millions on the streets to protest for their rights and freedoms on the streets.
By now, images of the protesters clutching their smart-phones are synonymous with the movement: taking live footage, receiving the latest updates on police movements and the authority’s statements, sending messages to fellow protests, or crucially, receiving instructions from the intentionally anarchic mobilisation forums and chat rooms for the timing and location of the next protest event.
Now, more than ever, the Internet is playing a commanding role in the political future of a people.
Despite the tight grip that China exerts on the Internet within China, with citizens subject to numerous restrictions and widespread censorship, Hong Kong’s Internet has remained largely free due to the region’s autonomous status.
So far, there is only some evidence, that the Chinese government is actively monitoring the online activity and chat forums of pro-democracy activists. As such, China has mainly relied on spreading their view about the events through popular social media channels such as twitter and youtube. Indeed, all three major platforms, Twitter, Facebook and Google have since announced actions against thousands of coordinated Chinese accounts charged with spreading mis-information against the democracy movement.
Ominously, however, it is clear that the people of Hong Kong are starting to wonder how long it will be till China leans on the Hong Kong authorities to instigate a wide-spread Internet shut-down. Downloads for offline chat app FireChat have increased by over 100,000 in the past 24-hours.
Monitoring Hong Kong’s Internet Space, 24/7
In response, the Monash IP Observatory, has taken the step of publishing in near-real time, all of our measurements on Hong Kong’s Internet connectivity and latency, from our continuous global monitoring capability.
Since August 13, we have made over 5 million observations, at hourly frequency, of the availability and quality of the Internet across Hong Kong. Our infrastructure runs continuously, from multiple sources globally, ensuring that any anomalous observations, such as a partial, or full, Internet shut-down or speed throttling at one or more of the Districts of Hong Kong will be visible to the citizens of Hong Kong and the international community.
The dashboard provides users with a number of tools for interacting with the data, including selecting their own target/control Districts for inter-District comparison, drilling down on automatically flagged anomalies, or downloading the data behind any plot they create.
Of course, it is our intention to ensure that any government, the Hong Kong authorities and their colleagues in China included, are aware that any significant variation in availability or quality of the Internet, however, precisely administered to some specific geo-spatial region, will be made known and documented for all through our technology.
Our coverage of Hong Kong follows our coverage of the Venezuelan pro-democracy movement and electricity outages, shut-downs in Ethiopia, the ICT impact of Cyclone Fani and Hurricane Florence, and the 2018 Russian Presidential elections.
Methods | Connectivity, Latency
To generate the data behind these observations, we combine a commercially available geo-located IP database with our powerful scanning technology which measures the online or offline status of millions of Internet addresses globally every hour.
Our observational methodology uses the most basic Internet messaging protocol that is widely used billions of times a day to establish routes for your email, tweet, or share. After developing a carefully selected set of Internet addresses (IPs) to measure, we periodically send them one of these tiny messages, essentially asking, ‘Are on you online?’. These online/offline answers form the basis for our ‘connectivity’ indicators.
In addition, we also receive back from these measurements the responsiveness, or latency, of the IP (measured in round-trip-time, or rtt). Latency is a reasonable proxy for the experienced speed of connection, especially for any user who is interacting with a major social platform where even basic chat activities to other users nearby must travel to a server well beyond national borders (and back again!). Given that our team has previously leveraged significant changes in rtt to identify instances of repressive internet throttling by authoritarian leaning regimes, we also make available latency indicators on our dashboard.
For both connectivity and latency, we have developed an automated anomaly detector. The detector is tuned to pick up major deficiencies in connectivity or slow-downs in latency, relative to a long-run baseline. Anomalies are immediately reported in the dashboard and can be interacted with by the user.
Importantly, the IP Observatory has no access to any content being shared, viewed, visited, or generated by a user at a given IP, and, all IP Observatory activity works in aggregates of thousands of randomly sampled measurements across geo-spatial sub-regions.
The mission of the Monash University IP Observatory — ‘internet insights for social good’ — is to monitor the availability and quality of the Internet during critical events such as elections, natural disasters or conflict to provide. The observatory was founded by Klaus Ackermann, lecturer in Econometrics and Business Statistics, and Simon Angus, and Paul Raschky, Associate Professors in Economics. The observatory is a project of SoDa Laboratories at the Monash Business School, and tweets @IP_Observatory.
