Internet Censorship and Surveillance

This article is contributed by our team member Jacob. He will discuss the current Internet censorship and surveillance condition in different countries in the following content.

I have lived in many countries in the past two decades. The internet is basically what has made this possible. My lifestyle is pretty much impossible without it because I would not be able to keep in touch with family and friends who are in other countries. in this article, I am going to discuss the various forms and flavors of internet censorship and surveillance in place today, and give a detailed and nuanced opinion on each of them.

I think that it makes sense to begin this piece with a list of the different types of internet censorship and surveillance. I break this down into two main categories: government and corporate. You’ll note that there’s also a third and honestly much more pervasive category which I call hybrid. Hybrid censorship and surveillance is when there is active collaboration between government and large corporations to obstruct the free flow of information for various and sundry purposes.

Government

Bad

• China’s great firewall
• affects content
• US’s great financial firewall
• affects crypto exchanges and financial products
• European regulation, such as GDPR
• Religious content restrictions
• Political content restrictions

Corporate

Fine or good

• Twitter curating offensive tweets
• Facebook curating offensive content

Ok

• organizations blocking access to sites like Facebook at work

Bad

• Rumored back doors in hardware and software products

CPUs

Mobile OSes

• Mobile apps spying on users
• hard to explain vulnerabilities in operating systems like Microsoft Windows

Hybrid

• Regulations such as the clipper chip which propose to deliberately we can encryption in consumer products so that governments can enforce censorship and surveillance
• The Chinese Internet Content Provider licensing scheme which obligates private companies to police user speech
• Well known surveillance of WeChat by the Chinese government
• Funding of “privacy tools” like TOR by the United States government

Okay, now that the list is out of the way I would like to address censorship and surveillance by nation states.

Worst Case Scenario: North Korea

In North Korea, citizens are not allowed to use the internet. There is a national intranet, and it is heavily restricted. Because of this, North Korea does not benefit from the many economic advantages of global interconnectivity. There are market socialist economies, most notably China and Vietnam, where companies and individuals derive massive economic benefit from the access to information and people that the internet provides. The North Korean regime chooses to maintain a position of strict isolationism, and to carry that over to networks. It is my opinion that if North Korea experiences a state failure due to the economy, the root cause will actually be the vast delta in access to the global economy caused by the total lack of internet freedom.

Censorship and Surveillance: China

Inside China, companies must register an internet content provider license so that they can distribute content online. This license makes them responsible for the conduct of their users online. Additionally, China imposes unclear restrictions on foreign web content. Chinese networks are known to be carefully monitored, and companies in China are forced by law to participate in both the censorship and surveillance of Chinese users. China does not attempt to ban all use of the foreign internet. Instead, China makes it very difficult. A cottage industry of both domestic and foreign VPN providers targets the Chinese market. Entrepreneurial Chinese are known to register for multiple VPNs to ensure that they can continue to access information from the outside world. Chinese companies are able to purchase uncensored internet access but at a very high cost.

The strategy employed in China with the Great Firewall is to discourage use of the non-Chinese internet, while encouraging use of the Chinese internet. This policy ensures that Chinese companies have the upper hand when selling online to Chinese consumers and companies, and effectively renders the normal Chinese internet a sandbox.

Another byproduct of the Chinese government’s collaboration with Chinese companies with regard to internet regulation is pervasive surveillance. In China, the government can read nearly any chat, and monitor nearly any conversation online. This has a chilling effect on discussions concerning governance. in fact, that is likely the desired intent of Chinese internet surveillance.

It is also notable that there have been accusations that Chinese companies export software and hardware products that enable the Chinese government to surveil more widely. Recently, TikTok and Huawei have come under fire for just such issues. TikTok was found to be collecting vast amounts of user data, including everything that a user copied and pasted. It should give you pause that this is even possible, because this data collection indicates weaknesses in the security models of both Android and iOS, which together run the vast majority of the world’s mobile phones. HuaWei is accused of building back doors into the hardware that they sell, enabling surveillance of global users. Specifically, these accusations centered around 5G infrastructure. If 5G infrastructure were compromised, it would be possible for the Chinese government to monitor all communications that pass through that 5G infrastructure.

To conclude this section discussing China, I think that it is very fair to say that China aggressively censors and surveils its domestic internet users, while attempting to build systems that enable global surveillance. Additionally, China has attempted to pursue policies that would enable it to censor internet content abroad. Hybrid policies in China make Chinese companies the tools of the Chinese state with regard to internet censorship and surveillance.

United States

Censorship by platforms

In the United States, it is very common for private companies to censor internet content for its suitability for their platforms. As an American, I should say that I actually have no problem with this. Twitter and Facebook are owned by those companies, and they can choose what they display on their platform. This is leading to demand for decentralized, uncensorable alternatives, but nothing good enough to accommodate the large user base of Twitter or Facebook has come up yet.

Financially motivated censorship

In the United States, the internet is very free. For example, if I wanted to reach bitmex.com, no systems imposed by the US government would stop me. However, due to the state of US legislation that affects sites like bitmex.com, bitmex is forced to block users from the United States. We can see this pattern repeated with binance.us. Binance.us is a neutered version of Binance that is more compatible with US regulation. Binance.com is much better, but it is not possible to serve binance.com to American users. US regulation creates a situation where American users are censored from using many cryptocurrency exchange sites.

It is notable that the same situation is true for sites that specialize in gambling. Users are not allowed to visit these sites, not so much by US censorship law because the United States does not block websites at the network level, but instead at the level of the website itself. In order to comply with US regulation, these sites implement geo-blocking, which ensures that US users who are not using a VPN cannot use them.

Through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the United States also engages in a form of global censorship on behalf of copyright holders. The DMCA has also been used by companies to attempt to stifle speech online that they do not like. Furthermore, the DMCA has been used to suppress information about repairs for products like John Deere tractors. The DMCA is also responsible for the lack of freedom found in the HDMI standard. The HDMI standard is a perfect example of hybrid censorship, because it was created largely as a compliance measure and a concession to copyright holders. There are open display interface standards, like display port, which do not have the undesirable features of HDMI.

The United States also maintains a global surveillance apparatus. This was revealed by the Snowden revelations, as well as many individual leaks and have occurred over the years.

The United States…

• Openly seeks to gather nearly all information that transits the internet.
• attempts to surveil international fiber optic cables.
• collaborates with telecommunications companies like AT&t for the purposes of surveillance.
• Funds the development of “free” “privacy tools” like TOR.
• Restricts exports of cryptography
• Frequently considers legislation to ban end to end encryption for consumers
• Criticizes hardware manufacturers like Apple when their devices are actually secure
• Is known to have compromised various pieces of hardware and software for the purpose of a surveillance.

China is the global leadership in censorship globally, but the United States is the unquestioned master of electronic surveillance. Cloud providers in the United States are known to be basically automatically compromised by the government.

Protecting Yourself

In this article I have discussed a number of surveillance and censorship-related issues, And I have documented just how widespread and pervasive surveillance and censorship are on the internet today. You may read this and think: what can I do about it?

Some Good Practices

• Try to Avoid cloud services
• Don’t use Google services
• Don’t use Apple services
• Don’t use TikTok, Facebook, WeChat, Twitter, Instagram
• If you must use Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other social network use them via browser. Do not install the app! Apps are cancer
• Try migrating away from Android/iOS duopol. Try migrating to PinePhone, Librem 5, Sailfish OS or just don’t use a mobile phone
• Use a VPN

About that VPN…

You should be careful in choosing a VPN provider. Because the majority of VPN providers are based in a centralized corporation, they are capable of be tracing your contact information because you have made a payment to them. If you do choose a centralized VPN provider, choose one that accepts anonymous forms of cryptocurrency as payment and requires no additional information.

A V systems ecosystem flagship project, Tachyon, provides a decentralized alternative to existing VPN providers. Tachyon is incapable of betraying your contact information, because it does not know who you are. Maybe something about how Tachyon business model does not depend on stealing your personal info or something. Furthermore, when using Tachyon, you are able to select from many VPN providers. Provider nodes in Tachyon can be run by anyone, and securely route internet traffic. Additionally, if you live in a place that has routing issues like those that I experience in Vietnam due to AAG congestion, Tachyon may actually speed up your internet connection by enabling you to route around congested networks.

At Tachyon and V Systems, we believe that open, non-surveilled internet access is something that everyone should be able to have.in a perfect world, the internet would be both open and non-surveilled by default, but we do not live in a perfect world. in a perfect world, it would be possible to trust free security products like TOR, but we do not live in a perfect world.

In our imperfect world, if you are looking to ensure that your internet traffic is secure, Tachyon is an excellent solution.

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