Internet censorship is spreading rapidly, being practised by about two
dozen countries and applied to a far wider range of online information
and applications, according to research by a transatlantic group of
academics.
The warning comes a week after a Turkish court ordered the blocking
of YouTube to silence offensive comments about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
the founder of modern Turkey, marking the most visible attack yet on a
website that has been widely adopted around the world. A recent
six-month investigation into whether 40 countries use censorship shows
the practice is spreading, with new countries learning from experienced
practitioners such as China and benefiting from technological
improvements. OpenNet Initiative, a project by Harvard Law School
and the universities of Toronto, Cambridge and Oxford, repeatedly tried
to call up specific websites from 1,000 international news and other
sites in the countries concerned, and a selection of local-language
sites.
The research found a trend towards censorship or, as John
Palfrey, executive director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for
Internet and Society, said, "a big trend in the reverse direction",
with many countries recently starting to adopt forms of online
censorship. Ronald Deibert, associate professor of political
science at the University of Toronto, said 10 countries had become
"pervasive blockers", regularly preventing their citizens seeing a
range of online material. These included China, Iran, Saudi Arabia,
Tunisia, Burma and Uzbekistan. New censorship techniques include
the periodic barring of complete applications, such as China's block on
Wikipedia or Pakistan's ban on Google's blogging service, and the use
of more advanced technologies such as "keyword filtering", which is
used to track down material by identifying sensitive words. Methods
such as these are being copied as countries new to censorship learn
from those with more experience. "There's a growing awareness of best
practice - or rather, worst practice," Mr Deibert said.
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