[p2p-research] internet blackout in Urumqi

[Smári McCarthy]

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Important statistics here are the relative number of Internet users in
Iran versus China, the number of entry/exit points for Internet
connections, and the user demographics.

Consider that Iran is very much comprised of young liberal people while
China's Internet users are largely upper class business people; while
both of these statements are over-generalizations, they emphasize that
the difficulties involved in censoring Irani traffic are vastly greater
than those involved in censoring Chinese traffic, both for social and
technological reasons.

As for the Taliban controlling information flow, yes, certainly, but
their methods were (and are) very rudimentary: ban people from reading
anything informative, shoot people found with cellphones and laptops,
and so on. It wouldn't keep people from talking, but it would be a lot
easier to control the chatter. Nowadays Afghans in risky areas hide
cellphones and laptops in the women's bedrooms (as the Taliban won't
search there), and actually the Taliban themselves are starting to use
cellphones to organize themselves. One of the weirdest things I've seen
was a Taliban standing by the roadside seemingly writing a text message.

 - S


Andy Robinson wrote:
> Up until now, the Chinese "great firewall" has been of limited
> effectiveness - news of events, increasingly uncensored, has been
> finding its way out of China and back in again with great regularity -
> and the same can be said of Iran for instance.  The reason is that web
> users are very adept with things like proxies, anonymity software,
> backdoor tricks like using translation software to access websites and
> using web-to-mail, etc.  See for instance the media coverage of the
> Weng'an incident, and the Tibet revolt last year.  The internet has even
> forced state propagandists to start admitting and trying to spin events,
> rather than just denying or refusing to cover them.
> China regularly blocks and filters sites, especially at sensitive
> moments - on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square, they shut down the
> likes of Twitter and Facebook, and thousands of university bulletin
> boards, for the duration.  Obviously this is of limited use - all the
> usual tricks apply (accessing Twitter via a proxy or VPN for example).
> This time, they seem to have gone a step further and actually shut down
> the Internet - presumably by targeting its physical hardware, turning
> off the servers of the ISPs running into the area, maybe even shutting
> down the phone network.  This perhaps suggests the vulnerability of
> virtual networks: their continued reliance on physical hardware which
> can be subject to physical power.  (I've heard before about similar
> problems when the German state jammed mobile phone signals to disrupt a
> protest).  However, I wonder if the issue is that people are reliant on
> a limited number of connection nodes - it seems some tweets are getting
> out, but not full-scale blog entries - I would deduce from this that the
> tweets are coming from mobile phones, and that the relative paucity of
> output results from the scarcity of mobile phones in Urumqi.  Which may
> be why China has done this but Iran and Honduras did not.  However, this
> still raises the question of what might be done in a context where the
> state has shut down ISPs and also jammed mobile phones over a wide area.
>  Would it still be possible to get information out and onto the
> internet?  For instance, to somehow rig up computers to connect directly
> to one another using something akin to short-wave radio transmissions?
> There are also very low-tech regimes which are able to control
> information flow to some degree, by the very fact of being low-tech.
>  North Korea, to some degree Burma, and formerly the Taleban.  But
> that's a different question.  I would speculate that the quickest way to
> bring down the North Korean regime would be to saturation-bomb the
> place, not with bombs, but with radios.
> 
> 
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